Mount Kimbie, Photograph by Ian Laidlaw
Mount Kimbie performed at Forum Melbourne, on the land of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, on Thursday 5 June.
Mount Kimbie started out as an electronic duo. Dom Maker and Kai Campos’ early productions were atmospheric dance music abstractions decorated with R&B samples, field recordings and the occasional injection of heavy bass. But at Forum Melbourne, we got just one reminder of this phase of their career, the slightly wonky “Before I Move On” from their 2010 debut Crooks & Lovers.
In recent years, Mount Kimbie have transfigured into a fully-fledged band. The transition was gradual and organic, the band’s studio work becoming more influenced by their touring commitments with each successive album. The post-dubstep collages of Crooks & Lovers made way for the open-faced, song-oriented slant of 2013’s Cold Spring Fault Less Youth. By 2017’s Love What Survives, Mount Kimbie had taken on the sound of a post-punk band.
If that wasn’t evolution enough, Mount Kimbie expanded into a four-piece for last year’s The Sunset Violent, adding vocalist Andrea Balency-Béarn and drummer Marc Pell for a shoegaze and alt-rock influenced album that’d fit right in on Dean Blunt’s WORLD MUSIC label.
And so it was that the Mount Kimbie who made their long-awaited return to Melbourne were a rock band. And a good one, too. It’s easy to imagine how an electronic act reborn as a guitar-toting rock band might result in some awkward energy on stage. But that wasn’t the case here – there was little in the way of theatrics, and no onstage visual projections, but Campos, Maker and co. were giving it everything.
The setlist revolved around material from Love What Survives and The Sunset Violent. Both records are weighted towards songs rather than tracks, but Mount Kimbie rarely deal in conventional songcraft. Several songs, beginning with the set’s opening number, “Four Years and One Day,” felt like long, extended build-ups, the tension rising and bubbling, the band teasing a gratifying point of unravelling, but rarely delivering it.
Even during “Delta,” a song that starts its build from a point of heightened intensity, the band seemed intent on blowing the balloon up to its limits, but not letting it fly off into the sky.
Campos, who took care of the scratchy, distorted guitar playing, was fond of walking and head-banging around the stage. Maker, who split lead vocal duties with Balency-Béarn, didn’t depart from his keyboard station, but appeared locked in throughout.
Balency-Béarn was the conduit for the songs’ more animated, dancier elements, bringing the crowd with her as she stomped and gesticulated during the motorik “You Look Certain (I’m Not So Sure)” and the dark wave groover “A Figure in the Surf.”
Mount Kimbie’s half-dozen collaborations with King Krule are the apotheosis of their career output. King Krule’s Archy Marshall has a singular vocal presence, an unpredictable mix of impassioned anguish and gutter-dwelling blue metal. You’d be a fool to try and emulate it, and Maker didn’t really try, but with help from Balency-Béarn and Pell, he did a good job at conveying the panging existentialism of “Blue Train Lines.”
The Love What Survives highlight was the set’s penultimate song, and it got the most physical response of the night. It’s a prime example of Mount Kimbie’s knack for executing a continuous crescendo, building tension even in the quieter moments, and walking us to the point of catharsis while offering no easy answers.
The song’s hook, “I might have seen it all,” resonated. You might have, or you might have seen nothing at all.
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