KMFH - Down! + Our Love

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  • The hype around Kyle Hall peaked early—sometime around 2009—but it's in the years since that he's really found his footing as a producer, growing more assured and more exploratory as time goes on. This year's Girl U So Strong on Hyperdub was inspired and unclassifiable. Though Hall has never been labelled with this term, The Boat Party was, for my money, the best outsider house record that came out last year. Down! + Our Love combines two releases that came out three years apart, and in doing so shows how Hall's sound has progressed. "Xero" and "Down!" came out in 2011, a noticeably earlier stage in the evolution of Hall's style. The former is a slow-ish, lo-fi house cut that recalls Theo Parrish, with harshly overdriven drums and splashes of spacey melody. Like many of his tracks, odd blemishes reveal it to be a live recording—at one point the beat drops out for an awkwardly long moment, then punches back in a few times, never on the grid. The classic Detroit vibe continues on "Down!," a straight house banger with a party-friendly vocal loop ("let's get down, let's get down, come on, let's get down") rising and falling under Hall's EQs. The accompanying 7-inch, which first came out in May of this year, is less traditional. "Our Love" trades the soul vocals for something that sounds more new wave, complemented by heavily bit-crushed snares and a fuzzy, winding bassline. This being a 7-inch, the track is pretty short, and it ends unexpectedly—another of Hall's trademark imperfections. "Donz Critique" skips along at a tempo well over 140 BPM, with a swirling beat that hovers in and out view and a deadpan voice telling you to "dance if you want to." "Our Love" is the freshest thing here, but all four tracks have the wonderfully warm-and-dirty feel that makes Hall a favorite.
  • Tracklist
      12" A1 Down! B1 Xero 7" A1 Our Love! B1 Donz Critique
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