Sometimes, an album comes along that’s so absolutely resplendent, capable of hard carrying you through the toughest of times, softening the hardest of emotional blows, and offering some sort of guidance, if not literally then metaphorically. It’s great, unassailable in its placement in your heart and mind, maybe unreasonably so because of your bias toward it, but that’s okay. This music shit is all subjective anyway, it gains power through what power we give it. It’s a personal experience.
The album I’m talking about is Hiatus Kaiyote‘s last LP, Mood Valiant, an album that did all of the above while still being, with the most objectivity possible, a massively kick-ass and -dick album that was loved beyond all reason in 2021 by anyone that heard it. If you didn’t like it, you were wrong. How’s that for subjectivity? Regardless, it made their next work as anticipated as a presidential obituary, and now that it’s out, I can say with confidence and a tinge of disappointment that Love Heart Cheat Code doesn’t quite live up to the exorbitant hope set upon it, perhaps unfairly.
The thing with expectations is that, regardless of PR-led hype campaigns, they are largely a personal weight you place and put stock in. Each issue you have with an album or song you had expectations for is on you, not necessarily the artist. It’s not a bad thing – we all do it to some degree, especially if we’re familiar with the artist’s previous work, and it’s largely what makes negative or even just critical reviews awkward for me. Still, several loops of Love Heart Cheat Code have left me longing for the same sort of magic I found in even one or two loops of Mood Valiant. Is it just because I’m in a different place now than I was three years ago, or was the band actually slipping?
I won’t be answering that here because I don’t know, or really care (I am in a different, better place though). Instead, let’s just focus on the good for a few. First, Nai Palm still sounds amazing. She is without a single doubt one of the strongest singers in this lane, then and now. She’s really given her all on the last two albums especially, channeling all the goodness in her life since a very scary breast cancer battle a handful of years ago and putting it into her lyrics and vocals. It’s like she’s spiritually awoken, at peace and with heightened cognition, doing the Predator handshake with positivity itself. Perhaps that’s what went into specific finer details of Love Heart Cheat Code like doing a cute song about Longcat or featuring the voice of BMO from Adventure Time, the only credited feature, to remind us that everything is beautiful. It’s sweet and the sonic manifestation of :).
Even further down in the details is the meticulous touch of legendary engineer Mario Caldato Jr., most known for his work on the best Beastie Boys albums to be released. Hiatus Kaiyote have never sounded clearer or more textured than they do here on Love Heart Cheat Code, and I’d like to think a big part of that is thanks to Caldato. This is especially true on the last two tracks of the album, “Cinnamon Temple” and “White Rabbit”, the latter being a cover of Jefferson Airplane‘s song of the same name melted down and reconstructed over and over. They’re both fast and furious with the effects and experimental soul, making for a bit of a grating finish to an otherwise liquid smooth album. They are, sonically and abstractly, the most interesting things the band have done, even though I prefer their more soul/r&b-indebted side.
There’s plenty to digest on that front too, even if it doesn’t reach the same apex in the clouds as other songs like “Chivalry Is Not Dead” or “And We Go Gentle”. “Dreamboat” is a lovely, delicate intro track that sets the tone for much of the album’s tracks. The backing vocals are fantastic, the piano is skating all over the damn place, Nai Palm is reaching far up into her upper register for some notes, and I love the majesty of the ending instrumentation that dies down into “Telescope”, another silk-laden banger. This one has that awesome Hiatus Kaiyote bass accenting the track and an interpolation of lyrics and vocal melody from oldies classic “My Girl” by The Temptations, though instead of a girl making Nai feel a certain way, she posits it’s either the kush or outer space. I also really love the melodies that Nai and the band play with on “Make Friends” – it has a sweet sentiment that ‘you don’t make friends, you recognize them‘.
We’re speaking relatively here – a good Hiatus Kaiyote album is only good because they’ve achieved greatness before. If Mood Valiant was a 9 or even a 10 out of 10 album, Love Heart Cheat Code being a 7 or 8 is far from a fall-off, and surely some will feel the inverse to be true. Opinions are cool, y’all. This is simply mine, and I hope it’s apparent by now that I do really enjoy this album and what it brings. I’m interpreting this as Hiatus Kaiyote at their most casual, not shirking from exhibiting the maximum of their abilities, more so treating this album as a more structured and polished live jam session where there’s playful moments, crowd-pleasing ones, and trying out new things just to see if they work or how they feel, all seated in various levels of success, but overwhelmingly trending upward.
Love Heart Cheat Code really does a lot right, as you’d expect of Hiatus Kaiyote. Songs were stuck in my head for days, I found myself returning to it both for fun and deeper analysis with little trouble, but with also working in some relistens of Mood Valiant, the outcome was clear to me and is what you see reflected above. Still love this band, still will wait patiently for more from them or Nai Palm as a solo artist. This stuff just does something so important for me, I could never devalue it or forget it. So I won’t any time soon.
Band photo by Rocket Weijers
