Hudson Mohawke - Cry Sugar Music Album Reviews

Hudson Mohawke - Cry Sugar Music Album Reviews
Hudson Mohawke embraces dystopian trash-pop imagery on his first album in seven years, maintaining his trademark clarity while bleeding and oozing over a larger canvas than ever.

Hudson Mohawke lives in L.A. now, and he’s fallen head over heels for the American tradition of dystopian trash-pop imagery. The video for a megamix of tracks he released in advance of his third album, Cry Sugar, shows us a CGI scene of a man cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway with an assortment of Mos Eisley-worthy weirdos and an animated woman so buxom she appears warped. It looks like Grand Theft Auto and Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” video at once, run through the brain-fried filter of Kuso, Tim & Eric, and Adult Swim’s Off the Air. The cover by Willehad Eilers features the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters horking down a hamburger. In a city whose hills host the Hollywood sign, the Griffith Observatory, and an alarming regularity of smoke-belching infernos, it’s hard not to find the humor—and the horror—in this aesthetic.

The Scottish producer born Ross Birchard cites “American decadence” and the “quintessential backdrop of late capitalism” as an inspiration for his first solo album in seven years. Cry Sugar isn’t a polemic or satire, but it strikes some of the same notes as Idiocracy or Robocop, in which everything is so big, garish, and dumb it’s almost psychedelic. It’s full of moments that seem distasteful at first until you realize that’s exactly the point. Clarence Coffee Jr.’s rasp initially seems at odds with the music’s polymer-like textures, but he strikes the right note on “Bow” with crass, unsubtle lines like, “Now you walk around all stank-face like you need some Febreze!” Gospel samples abound, and when the choir rises up and screams “Freedom!” on “Intentions,” you might wonder if Birchard knows how cheesy it sounds—until the rest of the album makes it abundantly clear that he does.

Birchard’s style has long lent itself to adjectives like “colorful” and “neon.” But while his sharp shares and tightly quantized beats usually bring a sense of order to the mayhem, Cry Sugar spills all over the place, and the time-stretching and pitch-shifting Birchard slathers on his samples make them sound like they’re melting under the pitiless Southern California sun. Tobacco and Neon Indian go for a similar effect in their work, but while those Day-Glo detritus-diggers tend to choke their tracks in thick production smog, Cry Sugar retains the clarity of Birchard’s earlier music, sometimes giving the impression of a sturdy steel skeleton whose flesh is melting off. “Intentions,” “Bicstan,” and “Dance Forever” are absolute monsters that approach the same almost ridiculous level of intensity as TNGHT’s definitive “Higher Ground” while clearly being born from a more expressionistic corner of Birchard’s brain.

Cry Sugar is Birchard’s longest album by some measure, with 19 tracks that bleed and ooze across 63 minutes. But it’s not long in the way of some bloated event-rap album, rather in the way of great electronic long-players like Since I Left You or Geogaddi, where so much awesome shit happens that you grow excited about what comes next even when the album starts to drag. Most of Cry Sugar’s tracks are around two or three minutes long, but Birchard judiciously breaks up the flow with lengthier cuts, and they’re doozies. “Is It Supposed” is either building towards nothing or climaxing for six minutes, its wistful rave melody sparkling like a firework that refuses to extinguish. “Rain Shadow” is so rhythmically tricky that it eventually stops sounding like a banger and takes on a sort of insectoid beauty. “Lonely Days” is all strings and Westian melodrama.

My personal favorite, though, is “Stump,” one of the first songs from Cry Sugar to see the light of day. It sounds like Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra*—*the tone poem used in 2001: A Space Odyssey to soundtrack mankind’s ascent into the higher realms of sentience—for about two seconds. Then Birchard plays a chord so dissonant the high drama immediately curdles into a joke, as if the starchild has missed its path back to Earth and gone plop into the surface of the sun. It’s exactly the kind of unexpected, pessimistic, profoundly ridiculous sound gag that Cry Sugar delivers one after another, adding up to the funniest, most mind-twisting album Birchard’s ever made.

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About Wanni Arachchige Udara Madusanka Perera

Hey, I'm Perera! I will try to give you technology reviews(mobile,gadgets,smart watch & other technology things), Automobiles, News and entertainment for built up your knowledge.
Hudson Mohawke - Cry Sugar Music Album Reviews Hudson Mohawke - Cry Sugar Music Album Reviews Reviewed by Wanni Arachchige Udara Madusanka Perera on August 22, 2022 Rating: 5

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