The other day I had to sit myself down and tell myself it’s impossible to read every genre of literature, even if reading is one of the most important things to me. So, in order to ingrain good reading habits, I told myself I was going to focus on essays and poetry--fiction be damned. It’s similar in a way to music, where, just because I love music, doesn’t mean I have to love all types of music. Dubstep and its minions are a casualty of my music rationing.
Cosmic Boogie’s opener “Mowdery Pildew” proceeds as an aquatic, slippery dubsteb number. It hits all the right buttons, literally, and I feel that this elusive genre can finally appeal to me. When you listen to Heyoka, though it may feel familiar in terms of sounds and aesthetic, it carries its own spin on beaten paths. “Cabin Fever” follows the opener with a wacked-out beat, constantly extending itself like taffy, and then abruptly resetting. It’s like machinery going haywire, with the electro-pop sensibilities of Crystal Castles. In fact, if you tried to convince me this was Crystal Castles, I’d probably believe you in ten seconds. However, you compare Heyoka to their peers, like Castles, and they don’t quite carry the ambition one would like to see. Instead of experimenting with equally fucked-up vocals that resemble pop music, they let their music remain faceless.
Heyoka’s darker peer, Burial, uses atmosphere and vocals to drive songs home, but never overindulge the songs. Heyoka, however, under-indulge, if anything. I’m sure this album was made with every intention of being solely instrumental—big mistake. If you can make it to song nine, “Shlomsky”, without being totally checked out, you’re a stronger person than me. Instrumental electronic dance music can be the most exhausting hour you’ll ever have to experience.
Heyoka seems to create everything electronically, then messes with it to make all of the sounds distorted and formless. The impressive thing is that while all of the sounds are tugging and pulling on one another, a clear structure emerges, even consisting of recognizable hooks. It’s just that fifty-one minutes of this can get pretty overbearing without a tour guide, so to speak. This is an album that really needs a voice, whether it be straightforward or processed vocals. On Cosmic Boogie, the songs are always doing the same thing, and after a while, all of that tugging and pulling begins to erode the listener. There’s nothing to break up the monotony, be it a change of approach or a human voice. I made it to track five before I wanted something else to happen--desperately. Remember earlier when I said, machinery gone haywire? Apply that tagline to every song and you get an enormously huge insight into the makeup of this album. Notes skitter, stagnate, rocket-off, and slide with such ease, always with aquatic splashes accenting the background. And yet it never sticks, since the idea never becomes fully formed. Perhaps Heyoka should move forward with more ambition, a greater sense of self-worth in the pop realm. Crystal Castles and Burial make the right moves when it comes the entire aspect of song craft. As beat makers, Heyoka can hang with anybody in the scene, that’s for sure. But to ignore the laws of album making is an arrogance I can’t defend. A near hour of a bunch of alien noises going the same direction will not hold up.
Track List:
1. Mowdery Pildew
2. Cabin Fever
3. Noises
4. Chaos Theory
5. Broken Bits
6. Fractalcore
7. Amenhostep
8. Mourning Wood
9. Shlomsky
10. Slippery
11. Thingiemabob
12. Plasma
