#Hiatus kaiyote mood valiant vinyl series#

Mood Valiant is that rarest of things: an experimental record which welcomes its listeners into its inner realm with open arms engrossing, rewarding - and often even downright lavish - this is an album which is as easy to approach as it is to fall head over heels for. They aren't catchy as such - there's far too much going on at any given moment to allow the band the straight-laced presentation of the best pop songs, even if they're more than capable of penning a great hook - but these songs are certainly accessible.

#Hiatus kaiyote mood valiant vinyl series#

Hiatus Kaiyote's songs are mutable, effervescent things - each one a series of sumptuous, velveteen crescendos wrought in buzzing notes and ricocheting rhythms. It's the band's heady - if not downright decadent - audio trickery which serves as Mood Valiant's defining trait. Such factors have, instead, coalesced to inform Hiatus Kayote's best album so far. Yet that hasn't happened - not at all the half-decade silence which preceded Mood Valiant hasn't dulled its Melbourne-based authors' compositional smarts and external forces haven't strong-armed them into adopting a more conservative sonic approach.

It's easy to imagine, therefore, that Mood Valiant's songs could've fallen flat that they might well have seemed lacking somehow, as though the band - trapped, as they were, in a vacuum outside of the typical album-tour-album cycle - might've found themselves limited by a certain disconnect from their prospective audience. If nothing else, the album marks a triumph of maturation in the face of adversity it's never easy for a well-liked band to return after a lengthy absence (six years, in Hiatus Kaiyote's case) - much less so in the midst of a global pandemic which long ago put the kibosh on large-scale touring.