- Drinks is the collaboration of songwriters Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley. Both have previously had their solo work represented by American indie-rock mainstay Drag City and they make their Drinks debut for the label with their sophomore album Hippo Lite. On Hippo Lite, Drinks harken back to the kind of lo-fi experimentation that first brought the label to prominence. There's a nod to the nomadic, creaking door domesticity of Bill Callahan’s early records as Smog, and the hermetic and caustic rock’n’roll of recording duo Royal Trux. But much more distinctly throughout Hippo Lite there's homage to the aesthetic sensibility of Gareth Williams & Mary Currie's Flaming Tunes. Drinks utilise a distinctly reminiscent mix of field recordings, ready-made percussion, hypnotic piano, understated bass lines, brash vocal harmonies, amateur violins, guitar twangs, occasional keyboard, drums, and playful nursery rhyme like lyrics.
They share a similar approach that prioritises individualist style, raw experimentation, perverse intimacy, black humour and most importantly the exploitation of the limits of their situation. In the case of Hippo Lite, that situation is the one month that the pair spent in shared isolation in rural Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort, living together in an overheated old mill without a proper recording studio or exposure to most modern conveniences. Drinks both reflect and impose themselves on the idyllic location. Reflectively using it for it’s natural acoustics, ambient sounds, and as inspiration for the lyrical content of the album, while imposing their strong aesthetic sensibilities on the material and by deliberately making their personal experience of the time and place while recording the album it's conceptual focus, most clearly in the playful reinterpreting of their location's name in albums title and the artists two distinct recollections of their time in Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort that comprise the liner notes.
Blue From The Dark introduces the first side of the album with a sweet fingerstyle acoustic guitar melody accompanied by a distant clave and soft then stuttering, piano. As a cascade of rustic, percussive samples and field recordings begin to colour inside the lines, Le Bon and Presley sing in unison, with Presley's restrained baritone crooning over Le Bon's high operatic register. The musical ideas are simple, but are so embedded in each other as to become almost indescribable, like most of the lyrical songs on the album, it's cleverly structured and full of immensely unique colours and dynamics. Real Outside lingers on a looping chorus of twanging guitars, bass, and eclectic mix of percussion that ranges from a strange door knocking, a triangle and real drums. The same angular pop feel reprised on Corner Shops, with both taking it in very different directions.
Drinks take great advantage of the lack of definition in their recording as well, which is particularly evident on the many ambient and instrumental tracks. When I Was Young plays with a warped tape recording of a piano melody that cascades and eventually drops to a bradycardic pace through tape speed changes. It's both self-reflexive and naive, and it makes it hard to pin-point exactly what Hippo Lite is. It's intentionally eclectic and it moves between a wide array of styles and feelings, but that's exactly what makes it engaging. It’s an expressionistic interpretation of living, littered with sounds of real life, flourishing melodies, harmonic duets and gentle adornments of rustic domestic life.
- Jaden Gallagher.