- When I read about how it’s yoga-house, accelerationist-pop, symbolising “movement and achieving zen through accepting ongoing chaos”, my head begins to ache a little. That’s the exact opposite of how I feel when I actually listen to the elusive Melbourne artist Maliblue’s new record, Hex.
What little I do know of Maliblue is that they have a history with vaporwave labels Adhesive Sounds and 永遠に B O G U S // COLLECTIVE and -so much is obvious from listening to the new record- an obsessive taste for digging up tracts of old AM warm disco, jazz and exotica.
You probably have some idea of where this is going: all of those dusty archival sounds get run together with new beats, or old beats, or new beats treated to sound old and away we go. Hex is, often, a warm and pleasantly fuzzy lo-fi trip through some cheesy beats of yesteryear. UK garage (on trykt) rubs shoulders with jazz, funk and disco and a sneak attack by orchestral exotica (which is dual and the title-track), all of which make the most of taking the sterile edge off the beats with pleasantly low-fidelity memories of the already warmly organic, vintage sounds.
The songs get longer as the record progresses and Maliblue does definitely have a few more tricks to play, listen to acrobatics to hear the sound flip out into a kraut-ish prog-rock. It may lose something in danceability, but it feels just as much at home in the hazy atmosphere. From there another summersault lands us in tessellate, which kicks off with a Madchester dance-rock -that should please Primal Scream fans- passes through an odd piano-prog bridge and finishes in a ludicrously upbeat, late-Stevie Wonder, electric piano bar sound. I was already scratching my head about why Maliblue wanted to run those three, essentially unrelated songs into one ten minute track, before getting a sugary sucker-punch from closer ecstasis, which sounds like a sped-up theme tune for some early-naughties dramedy. In the most unlikely way it’s the perfect finisher because, god help me, I just drink it in like liquid cheese every time I hear it and I really want to watch that show.
There’s a lot that’s nuts about this record, like why does every track have to finish at something-minutes-and-thirty-three-seconds? I have a feeling that if I found out more about the philosophy behind it I might like it less, but as it is: the cheese, the warmth, they feel generously giving and it makes me want to be just as affirmative in return. So much of vaporwave feels deliberately, clinically false, but whatever you call this, it doesn’t have that problem. Maliblue might have stolen all the soul Hex has from somewhere else, but boy it’s got a lot of it.
- Chris Cobcroft.