Mount Kimbie: Cold Spring Fault Less Youth

By Alif Omar Mahfix • 03 Jul 2013 in Review

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TOOK THEIR TIME
Like topiary experts, Mount Kimbie deftly clipped UK electronic genres off their excess twigs and overgrown foliage, creating a masterpiece in the artful Crooks & Lovers, JUICE’s favourite UK album of ’10. The debut album was also a favourite of other critics and publications, listed on 10 too many Top 10 lists of the year, following up such a critical darling with a sophomore album was indubitably a daunting task. Yet here we are with Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, an unsurprisingly Mount Kimbie album.

It isn’t without its risks though; the boys take more chances with their voices without utilising it too often and like a lot of electronic acts these days, they made use of live instrumentations this time around. Bass lines, drums, and brass make an appearance without belying the fact that, yes, this is an electronic album by the UK’s best recent act. They act as just another layer to the music as opposed to a hackneyed attempt to make their music ‘realer’.

Cold Spring is decidedly anti-nostalgia – it’s a modern album indebted to peers such as Oval, Four Tet, and Burial, made by survivors of the halfass post dubstep label that was the vocabulary of every music critic 3, 4 years ago. The best tracks off Cold Spring owe their outstanding quality to the gravelly young voice of King Krule, whose precocious underclass musings on ‘You Took Your Time’ (something of a grime ballad) got us wishing for a collaborative album between the two.

LISTEN TO: ‘You Took Your Time’
IF YOU LIKE THIS YOU’LL DIG: Four Tet
RATING: 3.5