It’s 2015, have you not joined the Cult of Daly?
It takes a special someone to join a cult. Not everyone can pull off the shaved head and bed sheet look, and you know that the one attractive cultist in recruitment is never going to sleep with you until you get your operating Thetan levels up to at least IV, and that’s going to take time and effort on your part. Fortunately, josh kumo has put together the perfect hardcore minimalist beat tape for your descent into Jonestown levels of depravity.
kumo’s tracks are for true adherents, not novices. Marrying spaced and spooky strings and keys to exceptionally well programmed drum machines, jk creates noises for the dark places of one’s soul. The self-proclaimed master blaster “if Mozart was born in ’95 and was a young nigga from South Carolina” starts hard and seldom lets up. Opener “beneath the planet of the bathing apes” starts out with an audio clip stretched to the point of near gibberish before equally distorted percussion and synths combine to form a sinister and paranoid air. Follow-up “black” ups the emotional heft and displays some of kumo’s aforementioned drum machine expertise, with dusty, delayed horn samples against a stuttering, jittery beat, for your caffeinated Kool-Aid lovers.
“gold” and “contempt” follow similar downward trajectories, juxtaposing spacey riffs with mechanically precise percussion. The penultimate “rare” flips the script, maintaining the same levels of menace but adding Flash Gordon synths to the equation, resulting in Vangelis/Blade Runner territory.
“taxi (redux)” ends things on as close as the album comes to a high note, with the cleanest sounding horns and slightly less twitchy drums riding out in style. No one here is an astronomer, so I can’t tell you when Hale-Bopp is coming back again, but i can assure you that you’re going to want josh kumo’s cults in your pre-approved streaming device of choice while you rock those Nikes waiting.
