The Peak Of London Sound

Three years is how long it's taken for Mount Kimbie to release a second album. Whether you see that as a long time or not is one argument, but it doesn't really apply in any force to the London-based duo; those years were occupied by a constant touring schedule that barely left them time to breathe. In fact, one whole year was taken up by nothing but a constant tour. 2010's Crooks & Lovers was a milestone of London Sound production: it was wonky, minimal, chaotic in places and, by most aspects, groundbreaking. Dominic Maker and Kai Campos found no shortage of avenues to showcase their love of aural exploration. With the release of Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, round two of the road obsession is now on, and it finds them miles away from home in… London?

“We're actually in London, Ontario,” Maker chuckles over the phone. “Yeah, it's a pretty small place. We're gonna go have some food in a little bit and look around. There's not really much to see here, and it's pissing down with rain at the moment.” So… typical mid-summer Canadian weather, then. “Yeah, that's it. It was raining the entire time we were in Toronto as well, and then we drove down here all the way in the rain. But yeah, you can't complain.” Well, you could, actually: following a few gigs in the UK to warm up and stretch the bones after spending weeks in the studio on Cold Spring… Mount Kimbie toured Canada, with a full west coast US tour beginning days after our talk. Then, there's UK and Europe dates that go until the end of the year. But Maker is more than casual about the whole thing.“ It's nice to get out there on the road and tighten up as a band, and all that kind of stuff,” he says. “Playing new songs is just really exciting and fun.”

You would expect that from any band – the chance to get out on the road and test out the material that you had spent so long working on is one of the great payoffs of being a musician. But then you look at Mount Kimbie, and the complex and avid composition of their music, and the idea of constructing a live set becomes a little more difficult. Spending so long holed up in a studio can't help too much, either. “It's weird, because we had thought that we had cracked the way to tour, and we thought we were so experienced in it,” Maker recollects. “We thought it wasn't going to be too much of a shock to the system, but it's been the total opposite. You really just forget how full-on it is. We finished the record, and then we were straight into rehearsals. We've got a new drummer with us, and we kind of just took the songs apart and made them suitable for playing live. But yeah, it took us ages to get back into writing after the first set of tours, and then having to get used to the tour routine again was exactly the same. I thought it was going to be well easy, but it's just not.”

Luckily, they were armed with an album that was more than anyone hoping for an able follow-up to Crooks & Lovers could have wanted. It's jam-packed with new ideas, and the competency to translate them to an audience. There's a lot going on: from deep, bass-heavy groove to clicky electronic hammering, all with a cool and forward-thinking aesthetic wrapped around it. Then there's the vocals. Very rarely do vocal melodies work so intrinsically in electronic mixing as they do on Cold Spring… with the mix of both Campos and Maker's voices appearing throughout every track, with sharp cameos from the likes of King Krule. “I guess the key point is that we don't really see the inclusion of vocals as anything unnatural for us,” Maker explains on the topic. “Really, we just saw a void where there was a melody line before. Maybe, in past times, we would've filled that using synths or a sample or whatever. For this one, it just felt necessary to use our voices. I mean, Kai sings on all the tracks, bar Made To Stray, where we split the duty. It was quite a challenge, going through that whole lyric-writing process, because we'd never done that before. He said he really enjoyed it, which is the main thing. I don't know; we didn't realise how much vocal content was on there until the album was done and we were sitting there listening to it being mastered.

“I think it means that we've put a bit more of ourselves on the line, as such,” Maker says candidly. “There's more on display and on show. So it feels, to us, way more personal and more of a risk, I guess. We do get a thrill out of taking risks in music, and using equipment we're not familiar with and stuff like that. I think that definitely rubbed off when we sat down to use Kai's voice. Again, it was just a new challenge; something we were excited about trying out.”

That active sense of risk-taking glows through both Mount Kimbie's music and their touring process, playing as many hidden alcoves of the world as possible. Touring again, then – and in the same way they did three years ago – can seem repetitive. But Maker is sure to confirm that they're just as keyed up to see where the rest of the year takes them as they were from the start. “I think it was important to let the dust settle, as such, from the last album,” Maker says on the gap between records. “It would've been sort of untrue to ourselves to come back with a sort of Crooks & Lovers Pt 2 or something. We weren't really interested in releasing anything until we were ready, which ended up being this album. It feels great to be back in the studio; as soon as we got back in there, we remembered the reason why we got into the business in the first place. It felt good to be back in there. And it feels just as good to be back on the road. We're lucky that we had that time; it gave us perspective, and a reason to get out there and play our music for people again.”