Kel McKeown has been producing music as Kelpe for some time now; his first release, The People Are Trying To Sleep, arrived back in 2003. However, McKeown has been crafting electronic music in some shape or form since before then, when as a young teenager he apparently opted for sampling and sequencing, instead of falling and bone-breaking via the art of skateboarding. Electronica the youthful investment of time that McKeown sought out, and it shows. From that debut EP, across remixes, further EPs, and albums, right up to The Curved Line, his fifth full-length.
As with the best electronica, especially that of the more sample, sequence, and loop-based variety, you can hear in McKeown’s music as Kelpe the precision of the craft; the right amount of repeats, when to layer it on thick, when to strip it all away, the control of a fluid mood, the very intricacies of the sequences, the samples to use, the added instrumentation to drive through. A precision of compositional details that only comes from immersing yourself deep within your sounds, and your songs, with complete patience and dedication.
It’s clear from this fifth album of his, that McKeown maintains that youthful exuberance to do that, but with the kind of discipline for it that only comes after the fact, with experience. Over the course of its considerable runtime, the album travels length and breadth of itself, exploring its spaces and exposing its textures all the while. The overall effect is an album it’s easy to experience as a whole, that begs you to turn on, tune in, and drop out to. An album applicable to contemplative downtime, late night drives to nowhere in particular, but with enough punch and rhythm to cut through a party on its way up, mid-plateau, or on its way down.
However, it’s when you break the album apart into its distinctive tracks that you really get a sense of, and appreciation for, the mechanics of it all. Whether that be the delicate, nocturnal cityscape painted by the album’s opening track, ‘Doubles of Everything’, that creates the same sense of the uncanny that its title implies, slowly bleeding thicker and more fizzily syrupy blood as it does so; the satisfied in its own insomnia of ‘Chirpsichord’s steadily dizzying, twinkly sequences; the robot dance of ‘Red Caps of Waves’ with its squelching drama; ‘Valerian’ and its rising tension; or the clear club cut tropics of tracks like ‘Calumet’, ‘Drums for Special Effects’, or ‘Canjealous’.
However, the tracks themselves, as with the album as a whole, weave in and out of those base descriptions I’ve given them. This helps provide a whole cohesive thread throughout the album, like following the same river through different scenery. Now, that could be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on your musical preferences; you may prefer an album with tracks more definitively distinctive from one another. Then again, though, you may enjoy blurred vision, and an album where its individual parts live, breathe, and bleed into and among each other. Your call.
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