In an interview with Pitchfork Media, Mount Kimbie’s Kai Campo said of imitators that “most of the music that sounds like it’s been influenced by [Crooks & Lovers] that has come out since sounds fairly dull, and it’s not something we want to carry on doing. We want to get away from it.” This could be taken to be as much an indictment of Mount Kimbie’s debut, Crooks & Lovers, as it is of its imitators –because it was so quietly seminal, and so copied across the London electronic music scene, Mount Kimbie have steered clear from the bleeping, sparkling electronica of Crooks & Lovers – even if in trying to seem more like a band, they’ve made the same move as some of their peers. Cold Spring Fault Less Youth is a renegotiation of sorts: not just of Mount Kimbie’s sound, but of decades of electronic music presentation. Though not necessarily the most captivating album in terms of songcraft, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth is so meticulously composed an album that every moment resonates with its own musical history.
This is not to say that there’s an awful lot that’s retro about Cold Spring Fault Less Youth; it smartly borrows from a kaleidoscope of warm analog tones while setting the presentation firmly in the vein of modern album oriented music, as opposed to the sorrowful decadence of neo-soul. Of King Krule’s contributions, it could be said that the young singer sounds more thuggishly maleficent here than anywhere else. “You Took Your Time” is a little too straightforward R&B for Mount Kimbie’s own good, though Krule’s ridiculously creamy voice and some very creative deviations of the keyboard from the song’s main theme aside. “Meter, Pale, Tone” is the more energetic and vocally alacritous of the collaborations, and the faux-jungle, swimming guitar line track is a lot more of a rock song than Mount Kimbie might have been expected to produce.
This is truly an album well within the UK dance and electronica obsession with blending the funniest aspects of retro soul and modern dub, even if it does push that bubble outward by a margin. Cold Spring Fault Less Youth has all the gummy, sleazy sophistication that was present on young Londoner’s Vondelpark’s 2013 album Seabed. Vondelpark masticated their Americana and soul into digital pool floor musings very much in the British IDM tradition (fairly tempered, northern factory bleak), whereas Mount Kimbie pay homage to soul’s goofier aspects. “Home Recording” starts off the album with a wonky callback to elevator jazz so enmeshed with 21st century recording and sampling techniques, not to mention the New Romantic-style vocals, that the cheesy organ riff manages to sound vicious and new. James Blake may be a vessel for R&B and soul to be spilled over Portishead-style electronica, but Mount Kimbie are true historians, diving past deep voices and swirling melodies and getting to the quantum mechanisms of what made the genres so captivation in the first place. Basically, it was a lot of weird stuff.
“Blood and Form” sells its experimentation short and “Slow” is an unfortunately derivative dancehall masturbation, all the more so because of how close this album follows on the heels of Random Access Memories. Mount Kimbie are clearly still unlearning some old tricks that could soon turn into crutches, though they fortuitously bury a lot of them under the sheer weight of this album. It is perhaps the case that Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, like so many follow ups, is less nouveau than its predecessor – it is certainly the case that many of the steps Mount Kimbie have taken are in the direction of pop and soul, and are not necessarily unsurprising ones. But it is an act of movement, and the album’s general creativity make it a promising, if sometimes obtuse listen.
4/5 bars