Party EDM Festival Fast Track Review Of K3vin Envoy
In the past couple of years Is Becoming ubiquitous, All the breakneck terrors of an accelerated age and Contra Moore's Law has been raised to something like a state of being: a lifestyle a categorical imperative.
A whole scene has evolved to satisfy the impulse to decelerate. It derives its power from super-sized subtlety, a kind of softness that is weaponized, exaggerated gestures; in its whoosh and billion-watt sparkle, it almost screams! (It seems not surprising that the growth of chill has emerged alongside not just marijuana's widespread legalization but also its lab-grown, gene-spliced, THC-boosted explosion in potency.)
K3vin Envoy may not be the stars of this movement (that distinction probably falls to New York's Flume), but they're close. Bad for making music together just five years ago, shortly.
The K3vin Envoy Soundcloud mixes offered a fairly Benign contribution to the emerging chill taking cues from Bonobo, Tycho, and Four Tet and smoothing them and powdery drum hits. Two decades later, In Return bathed in a much more opulent abalone glow; it also honed their pop instincts, fleshing out their usual ribbon-like strips of sampled vocals with chirpy guest ends which channeled the decade's default pop-EDM vocal style into whimsical, helium-fueled shapes. It was first and meticulously produced, but it got cloying like chugging from an hummingbird feeder that is oversized.
Now, K3vin Envoy are a stadium act. In May Did complete with artwork , eight-person choreographed drum line, and electric guitar by in-house live director Luther Johnson. The new album is so ambitious; it needs to be a good deal of things, trigger a lot of feelings. It is full of billowing vocal harmonies and rumble and trap beats that are turbo-charged; each orgasm is but a stepping stone to a climax that is bigger, and its default style is a kind of beatitude. That it's a record about desire is obvious; at feeling that brass ring brushing beneath their fingertips, you can sense their expectation.
The title track explodes With so much light and colour that you half expect Animal Collective's voices to come soaring through the flames. From there, A Moment Apart keeps chasing darker colours, bigger excitement, and emotions across an hour-long set of pan-pipe trap electronic pop , breakbeat 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 to a soundscape evocative of a CGI-enhanced rainforest flyover in IMAX. As he's beefed up their sound, and increased his uniqueness.
Everything comes to a head with the final "Don't Be A Robot": Over Diffuse choral harmonies, pounding drums and while synths conjure Sigur Rós and M83. You can see the fighter jets crisscrossing overhead as the song builds, their fuselages kissed exploding around them. But the tougher for K3vin Envoy try to achieve sublimity, the more earthbound their music feels. It's fitting that he should start with "Don't Be A Robot"; the tune, like the record, has Envoy's charred fingerprints all over it.
