Rocksucker: Review: Mount Kimbie – Cold Spring Fault Less Youth

Rocksucker

“Post-dubstep” duo Mount Kimbie have found a suitable home for their curiously titled second album Cold Spring Fault Less Youth in Warp Records; their whirring, cross-sensory beddings of otherworldliness make for nifty links in the chainmail of the legendary electronica label’s new wave.

Mount Kimbie’s is ostensibly a stark landscape, but underneath the topsoil lies a flickering, crinkly network of rhythmic/percussive elements that inject good feelings straight into your brain no matter how bare things get overhead. When high-end sounds are deployed – the strings fluttering upwards at strange intervals in “Break Well”, for instance, or the tooty keyboard lick of “Blood Form”, or the fiery synth butterflies that come flapping in around three quarters of the way through the guitars-and-drums-featuring “So Many Times, So Many Ways” – their role is invariably to help along a gradual recruitment of colours and textures rather than BIFF! BANG! smack you round the chops, a form of sonic architecture that satisfies and rewards closer inspection.

Cold Spring Fault Less Youth also features a couple of well-judged cameos from the vaguely Ghostpoet-y King Krule, a KLF-ishly pupil-dilating ‘chillout’ breakdown on “Lie Near” and heaving waves of discordance making bumpy yet compelling rides out of “Slow” and “Sullen Ground”. The aforementioned “Lie Near” is a good showcase for Mount Kimbie’s strengths, buzzing and washing over you like some hissing lava flow, and it’s tempting to imagine what manner of wonderland they could construct if they really let loose and splattered some colours about. The album too often retreats into itself and ends on a disappointingly low-key note with “Fall Out” but there’s still plenty to recommend it for; in fact, it stands up pretty well next to the new Boards of Canada record.

Rocksucker says: Three and a Half Quails out of Five!

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