You Can Be My Wave

This was another record I was going to let run by me. The little I do know about Hudson Mohawke is that the man delivers some pretty insane, heavy, EDM bangers. However, with songs like CBAT making their rounds all over social media these days, I get the impression that Mohawke's style is a little too goofy for me. A good friend recently insisted I give it a shot though, and I'm so glad they did because my impression immediately shifted. Cry Sugar totally lives up to its name with so many pieces of colourful ear candy. More than that though, the record actually provides a wide tonal variety that in its best moments inspire joy, spirituality, hopefulness, and curiosity. While the melodies go down smooth, Mohawke launches full-on assaults with the percussion. The beats are hyperactive and those kicks are always loud and ultra resonant. Nothing knocks quite like a Hudson Mohawke track. That's the sound of Cry Sugar in a nutshell and it results in so many fantastic tracks. Some of the best EDM I've heard in recent years.

An album can't start any stronger than this as we get one amazing song after the next. After a brief intro track that boasts dramatic strings, soulful vocals, and some building timpani, we launch into Intentions; my absolute favourite track. Every single element to this track is perfect. It has a nice jazzy chord progression played by sharp synths. The combination of hard rattling kicks and trashy, metallic hi-hats create such an aggressive percussion track that contrasts really nicely with that smooth chord progression. I love the vocal sample, especially the way it is manipulated with all these glitchy edits in the middle and time stretched in the outro to turn those vocals into a gritty synthesizer. Following that, we have Behold which feels like a deeply religious experience (coming from someone who is not religious) thanks to its sped up gospel sample. The bright horn synth shots and the trap flavoured percussion helps bring this holy engagement to the dance floor. Bicstan turns up the heat with these very rhythmic, staccato synth chords, steady rave percussion, and some acid house gurgling synth arpeggios. This one is a bit of an odyssey and I love it. Rounding out this amazing first leg is Stump, a beat-less, free flowing, cinematic, sci-fi epic. All these synths are layered to create this overwhelmingly beautiful rush of instrumentation that feels incredibly triumphant.

With a beginning like this, I'm excited. I'm thinking we're on track for one of the best electronic dance records of the year. However, Cry Sugar's issues quickly start to reveal itself. The first issue I have is that we start to get some tracks that breach the five or six minute mark and suffer from a lack of progression as a result. Is It Supposed, Lonely Days, and Tincture would all be excellent tracks if perhaps their pacing was tightened just a little bit so that we don't reach mind-numbing levels of monotony. Even the peaks and valleys of Come a Little Closer, a major late stage favourite, can be telegraphed from a mile away by the end of this record. My second issue is that there are tracks here that feel like unessential filler. Having 3 Sheets To the Wind and Some Buzz back-to-back, for example, is a bit of a creative low point. The former just alternates between two phases; one a seemingly untouched soul sample and the other some knocking hip-hop styled production with super resonant bass. The latter is a series of disjointed vignettes that aren't really given enough time to state their case and make their point. My last gripe with this record is that there are two songs on here that are absolutely cursed, and obviously not in a good way. I understand that Bow is trying to be subversive, but there are way too many clashing elements that are really preventing me from enjoying this track. Kpipe is even more of a 'wtf?' moment with grating instrumentation and jarring interjections that make absolutely no sense, especially in the context of this record.

It's a shame really. There is easily an album's worth of material on here that if we could just isolate that, would make me fall head over heels for it. Suppose Mohawke refined some of the longer cuts down to their more essential elements - songs like Lonely Days which I forgot to mention goes in a starkly different, more forlorn direction that I really appreciate - then now we're potentially dealing with an electronic record for the ages in my opinion. Alas, Mohawke's indulgences got the better of him and this nineteen-track, hour long odyssey ended up being padded with some really unnecessary moments as well as some really awkward detours. With that being said though, I still really enjoyed this record. I'm very thankful that I went back to listen to this one as a few of these tracks will likely be among some of my favourites of the year.