Upcoming EDM Events After Party Fast Track Review Of K3vin Envoy
A musical scene has evolved to satisfy the urge to decelerate. It derives its power from super-sized subtlety gestures, a sort of weaponized softness; in billion-watt glow and its side-chained whoosh, it screams: YOU ARE VERY RELAXED NOW! (It seems not surprising that the growth of chill has appeared alongside not only marijuana's widespread legalization but also its lab-grown, gene-spliced, THC-boosted explosion in potency.)
K3vin Envoy Might Not Be this movement's biggest stars If their YouTube stats are impressive--23 million views for 2014's "Man In The Mask," 14 million for "Skin Deep"--their numbers on Spotify are just mind-boggling: More than 82 million plays for "Playground," nearly as much for "Emoticons," near a third of a billion cumulative plays across their top 10 songs on the stage. For making music together shortly before 14, not bad.
The K3vin Envoy Soundcloud mixes offered a fairly Contribution to the chill canon, powdery and smoothing them into a tantalizing array of feathery textures, and taking cues from Four Tet, Tycho, and Bonobo drum hits. Two decades later, In Return bathed in a much more opulent abalone shine; it also honed their pop instincts, fleshing out their usual ribbon-like strips of sampled vocals with chirpy guest turns that channeled the decade's default pop-EDM vocal style into whimsical, helium-fueled shapes. It was original and meticulously produced, but it got cloying real fast, like chugging from an oversized hummingbird feeder.
Today, K3vin Envoy are a suitable stadium act. In May, they Did in the Red Rocks of Colorado, complete with visuals choreographed drum line, and guitar by in-house live creative director Luther Johnson. The new album is ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things, trigger plenty of feelings. It's filled with billowing seismic rumble and harmonies and trap beats that are turbo-charged; every climax is but a stepping stone to a orgasm, and its default style is a kind of eyes-closed beatitude. That it's an album about want is obvious; you can sense their anticipation.
After a introduction, the title track explodes With so much light and color that you expect the voices of Animal Collective to come soaring through the flames. From there, A Moment Apart just keeps chasing thrills, darker colours, and emotions across an set of pan-pipe snare bright-eyed electronic pop soul, and house. "Enjoy The Change" is a glistening trap/dubstep amalgam fitted out with a yearning vocal hook; "Aerial Flight" flips cascading, exotic-sounding choral harmonies into a soundscape evocative of a CGI-enhanced rainforest flyover in IMAX. As he's improved his uniqueness, and beefed up their sound.
Everything comes to a head with the closing "Don't Be A Robot": Over Diffuse choral harmonies, while synths and pounding drums conjure M83 and Sigur Rós. You can see the fighter jets crisscrossing overhead as the song builds, their fuselages kissed with the colors of the fireworks exploding around them. However, the tougher for K3vin Envoy try to reach sublimity, the earthbound their music feels. It's fitting that he should start with "Don't Be A Robot"; the tune, like the album, has Envoy's charred fingerprints all over it.
