Hiatus Kaiyote's songs are mutable, effervescent things - each one a series of sumptuous, velveteen crescendos wrought in buzzing notes and ricocheting rhythms. It's the band's heady - if not downright decadent - audio trickery which serves as Mood Valiant's defining trait. Such factors have, instead, coalesced to inform Hiatus Kayote's best album so far. Yet that hasn't happened - not at all the half-decade silence which preceded Mood Valiant hasn't dulled its Melbourne-based authors' compositional smarts and external forces haven't strong-armed them into adopting a more conservative sonic approach.
It's easy to imagine, therefore, that Mood Valiant's songs could've fallen flat that they might well have seemed lacking somehow, as though the band - trapped, as they were, in a vacuum outside of the typical album-tour-album cycle - might've found themselves limited by a certain disconnect from their prospective audience. It’s also long and dense–70 minutes of grooves proffered at a breakneck rate that closes in simple beauty.If nothing else, the album marks a triumph of maturation in the face of adversity it's never easy for a well-liked band to return after a lengthy absence (six years, in Hiatus Kaiyote's case) - much less so in the midst of a global pandemic which long ago put the kibosh on large-scale touring. Hiatus Kaiyote has diversified their song structures and tones in a very real way and, simply put, this is a record with much more in it. The complex, angular song structures beckon only to evade, bolting in unexpected directions just as they seem to settle into a groove.
None of Weapon’s 18 tracks is as accessible as Tomahawk’s Grammy-nominated single “Nakamarra,” the closest Hiatus Kaiyote has come to approximating a traditional pop song, but that’s what makes the album such a leap forward. Hiatus Kaiyote’s sophomore release Choose Your Weapon is a smorgasbord, clocking in at nearly 70 minutes and brimming with ideas. The band’s music is such a fast-moving, shape-shifting target, reducing it to a pithy genre descriptor is a fool’s errand. Melbourne, Australia’s Hiatus Kaiyote describes its sound as “future soul,” which is vague, inert language, but it’s hard to blame the four-piece funk outfit.
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