Mount Kimbie is again looking for a makeover. Over the past 15 years, the British duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos have morphed from post-dubstep to post-punk, techno to R&B, ambient garage to lo-fi pop, releasing DJ mixes and double albums, collaborating with James Blake and Jay-Z and King Krule and Travis Scott. Now they're back with something slightly different: a gritty, shoegazy, post-rock album called The Sunset Violent. With the help of new band members Andrea Balency-Béarn and Marc Pell, Mount Kimbie dust off their guitars and bring out their distortion, hoping to become Stereolab for a new generation, an electro-rock outfit whose work is so familiar as dark as it is.
The road to Mount Kimbie's revised sound has been a whirlwind. As underground electronic producers in the early 2010s, Maker and Campos' experimental flair punctuated otherwise minimalist compositions: a distorted acoustic guitar behind glassy ambient pads, rhythmic drums around synth keys. Their most recent album, 2022 MK 3.5: Die Cuts | Urban planning, branched out into fuzzy R&B and hip-hop before morphing into hushed, dubby club beats. Their defining work remains in 2017 Love that which survivesa new-age post-punk record full of over-the-top guitars and grainy cues, a style that fits the usual stuffy abstraction of Makers and Compos.
More stylish and safer than its predecessor, The Sunset Violent similarly provides a robust backdrop of fuzzy guitar and Korgs for Balency-Béarn and Maker's brooding vocals. The fledgling four-piece sounds like Sonic Youth or Young Marble Giants were DAW wizards, a band whose songs play like richly detailed dreams whose meaning can leave you scratching your head.
The loudest songs sparkle with a hazy allure. On “Dumb Guitar” and “Shipwreck”, Balency-Béarn's simple singing falls over hazy lounge-pop, giving The Sunset Violent some necessary friction. “Every day we eat out/Another date I'll kill myself,” he says on “Dumb Guitar.” Her luscious, unadorned voice is the closest thing the album has to an emotional center, especially with Maker playing the ruthless Oliver Sims supporting role he perfected on the xx. It's scary to hear how much more live King Krule's baritone can be heard on “Boxing” and “Empty and Silent”, how disconcerting his pen is – an amazing feat for such a famous beat. Sometimes The Sunset Violent searches high and low for a pulse and just comes up empty.
Maker is assured on the spectacular 'Fishbrain', a song brimming with bitterness and sadness. The writing is cryptic but sharp, with broken lines about falling bridges and “running out of movies” to watch. When Mount Kimbie aligns their singing with a tension, an emotion, a perspective – no matter how prosaic or subconscious – their songs soar. It's when they languish in repetitive patterns and dry melodies, like on “Got Me” and the first half of “A Figure in the Surf,” that they come back down to earth.
