Visions of broken sockets and cosmic supercomputers flash through my mind as I listen to the angelic yet tortured music of the kuru. Their unsteadily bright and heavy album re:wired it has the glow of a hologram and the shine of chrome. “I quit like I'm Sony,” they shout, and it sinks like obsolete material. After years of working in the shadows, the Maryland musician's debut pushes us deep into their psyche. It's a panic room full of miseries, victories, betrayals, realizations and music so dreamy it somehow sounds idyllic.
re:wired teleports between glacial environments and impactful carnage. The weak but feverish voice of the barber fills the mix like a vapor of permafrost. The 19-year-old artist has the angsty intensity of a paranoid: Throughout the album, even within a single song, he skitters between revulsion and confidence, brooding gloom and absurd soup-drinking asides. It's hard to tell where kuru's real and artistic self begins and ends, if they really want to CTRL+ALT+DELETE their lives (“If I died I wouldn't be against it,” says a line in “misery ost ») or if they play a character in a sad science fiction landscape. There's a definite anime and video game imprint on these tracks, from the titles—”misery ost,” “save;File-9″—to the deep-fried doinks, airbrushed alarms, and printers that pop on every beat. (The “wired” in the title could refer to the psycho-horror anime Serial Experiments Lainwhich has a global communications system called Wired.)
To the untrained ear, re:wired it can hit like a shapeless burst of Auto-Tune rhythms and “heavenly melody.” The stacking of sounds in a similar range makes certain tracks loop like hyperloops, the lyrics sliding into hooks without the tension of resistance. While kuru's flow is a consistently slick slipstream, their voice isn't as emotionally flexible – sometimes you can barely tell when they crash from elation to doom.
But often the dissonance between the bluesy lyrics and the lovely music really works, as if the right sound could save the kuru from heartbreak. “vo://id” cries out in physical and mental pain—images of ripped skin, body stretched thin, aching bones—while the beat exudes euphoria and uplift, a true RPG potion. Perk your ears and the tonal shifts and rhythmic variations are subtle but hypnotic. “yume” is the most relentless track but still feels plush. The kuru sound like a satin hammer, their voice awash in layers of ad-libs and vertiginous glossolalia like a Saya track. “I'd rather kill myself than fuck you,” they roar, a perfect distillation of the album's emo-aggro duality. “give me a second” might be the sweetest song, an ambient rap meadow of bare confession. “I'd be lying if I said I hate everything/What I hate most is feeling empty,” they moan.
