Love What Survives
Mount Kimbie harness their command of detail—plus star turns from King Krule and James Blake—on a rhythm-driven album that feels less like electronic music and more like the work of a full band.
From the jump, Mount Kimbie have been contrarian. The duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos may have chosen a handle that suggests a towering geological formation, but they quip that it merely signifies “a place inside all of us where buses arrive on time.” They began their career on the heels of dubstep, but instead of the drop, they favored drips, blips, and hiccups. Such smallness becomes Mount Kimbie, so much so that Maker’s recent production credit on JAY-Z’s 4:44 is for a song in which the sound of breathing sometimes overshadows the rapper himself. Mount Kimbie’s most ubiquitous two seconds, thus far in their career, might be the thrumming snippet of guitar strings that buzzes behind Chance the Rapper and Justin Bieber’s “Juke Jam,” sampled from their own Crooks & Lovers song “Adriatic.” Four years after their Warp debut, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, Maker now lives in Los Angeles while Campos is still in London. But despite swapping files across thousands of miles, they feel like a real live band bashing out their third album, Love What Survives.
While previous Mount Kimbie albums could bring to mind the meticulous and effervescent electronic music of Boards of Canada, Four Tet, and the like, Love What Survives churns and buzzes like post-punk or krautrock. Mixing circuitry and sweat, their drum machines stumble about like a hyperactive if unlearned drummer. Feeding back like overdriven guitars, the Korg MS-20 and Korg Delta synths that Maker and Campos used exclusively on the album elicit metallic tones reminiscent of plucked kalimbas, conjuring any number of Rough Trade bands from the early 1980s that moved from guitar-centered punk toward more exotic…