NO FEAR OF THE NEW: Kmoe, Cocojoey, Jake Muir
By John Warlick
In today's globally connected, genreless music world, it's a rare pleasure to discover music that feels like a genuinely new spin on things. In this column, I write about 3 new albums or songs I got into last month that I think push music in interesting directions.
My favorite discovery of the month gets a GET IN BEFORE YOU'RE LATE! emblem.
Kmoe - “Bloodbath (Dance)”
In the great lineage of "alternative" music being an excuse for gifted songwriters to write pop songs that make interesting decisions, here we have a perfectly tight alternative rock song, which is actually disguised as an east coast club song, which is actually written and produced by a dude from Vancouver. Kmoe's music has historically been lumped in with digicore, and his music leading up to his debut K1 has shown a clear lineage with scene contemporaries like Jane Remover and Brakence, other early-20s producers adept at writing diaristic rock-ish songs over loud, melodic, genre-colliding beats.
"Bloodbath (Dance)", my favorite cut from K1, feels cut from a similar cloth but isn't quite the same thing. It's more sleek; the noisiness is dialed into beveled edges, and clever decisions come across without beating you over the head about them. Like pretty much all music released on deadAir Records these days, the devil's in the details: take the effortless key change woven into the main theme, or how the bubblegum PC Music synths seem to starkly contrast kmoe's earnest vocal delivery by design. Honestly, kmoe's sound has become so refined, catchy and song-focused that it almost makes me want to argue that K1 is cresting the wave of sixth-wave emo; it's raw, introspective, hooky, and dangerously compact.
Cocojoey - Stars
It's been a pleasure to watch my WNUR college buds at Hausu Mountain unleash an effervescent tableau of outré genius into the larger experimental music world over the last decade, and their newest signing Cocojoey is absolutely emblematic of their optimistic, post-post-modern sensibility.
"TIME TO GO!", the first track on their newly-released LP STARS, is a model introduction to Cocojoey's sound; a dawning exposition leaps into a cheery, hyperactive J-Pop revue, and after a seamless segue into zap-fried black metal and back, Cocojoey's pastel-tinted otherworld locks perfectly into place. It's completely idiosyncratic but brimming with positive energy - a quick testament to how the most personal, honest music can be the most vivid and easy to connect to.
Another track to not miss is "TRUST IN EVENTS", which starts as a sorta-digital hardcore, sorta-new wave-by-way-of-PS1-soundtrack romp before sweeping into gleaming midi-prog fantasy with one of the best choruses of the year. It's also the catchiest song I've heard in recent memory that I couldn't readily tell you the time signature of.
Given the range of integrated styles and sensibilities here with border lines on the new age, singer-songwriter and extreme metal spectra, there are few contemporaries you can name for what Cocojoey does aside from Hausu labelmate Fire-Toolz (who serendipitously guests on another STARS highlight). Did I mention they rip on the keys? This is someone who can do it all, and I can't wait to hear what they do next.
GET IN BEFORE YOU’RE LATE!
Jake Muir - Campana Sonans
You might remember Jake Muir for making a great ambient album out of bathhouse noises last year. He takes a similar approach on Campana Sonans using much more family-friendly ambient whereabouts - English and German cathedrals - but it still feels like an unfamiliar head trip. Meaning you get not only panoramic swathes of bells, but also the tenuous hallways through the church; the energy of cars whizzing by through the rain; the din of tourists amid tourist-trap street vendors; all bent through a shifty, paranoid intensity.
More than anything, Sonans is a triumph of mixing. Muir's slyly heady electroacoustic atmospheres have spooky, psychedelic overtones not unlike the sparser moments of Manchester's Demdike Stare, but with a more distinctly German palette; the melodic swells that show up about halfway into "Erzklang" feel like textures Wolfgang Voigt would pull out of this subject matter if he were 20 years younger. It's not easy to stay engaging nor carve your own identity with this variety of ambient music these days, but Muir seems to be able to pretty reliably.