Love What Survives

Define artistic success as you will, but it’s beyond question that Mount Kimbie have here translated, and therefore transmitted, an entire state of being.

The duo’s music was always full of the small details, but they now conspire toward something bigger.

It’s a gorgeous, unreal place that Mount Kimbie evokes on Love What Survives, but dissonance leaks in through the crevices.

A notable cast of musicians, ranging from James Blake and King Krule to Micachu, impart their own idiosyncrasies, coming together to adopt a more avant-garde variant. But never does it hide the duo’s own merits, as they embrace a more vibrant form of beat-driven electronica that also functions in a rock context with collaboration at its heart.

Love What Survives, with its seductive beats and incredible production, is a strong record that finally cuts Mount Kimbie’s ties with ‘post-dubstep’. If they can avoid falling into routine, their post-post-dubstep future looks exciting.

The pair is further opening up its sound, exploring further possibilities that didn’t appear on its radar a few years back. The result is such an astounding record, which on one hand exists in the past, while on the other it looks forward into the future.

On each listen Love What Survives is a record full of raw honesty, both musically and artistically, and is worth your undivided attention.

[The] process of sonic expansion is continued apace on this latest effort.

Love What Survives is the sound of a band properly feeling around inside their own melodies. Along with their collaborations has come a glorious melodic freedom.

Ultimately, Mount Kimbie strip away any musical excess on Love What Survives, and leave raw vivid emotion.

It’s more of a slow burner--not so instantly gratifying as previous works--but the atmosphere of these tracks really gets beneath you. It’s their most affecting work to date by some stretch.

Love What Survives won't make Mount Kimbie household names, but it finds them in a new creative space that suits them.

On Love What Survives, Mount Kimbie have emerged from their chrysalis to become something new altogether. Some might be disappointed that, for now, they’ve moved further away from dance music. But in the process, they’ve made a bewitching kind of music that’s uniquely their own.

On their third album, the band’s instrumentals radiate wit and warmth, like mid-80s New Order sloshing around in a sun-kissed sea--but it’s as a foil to some of Britain’s most idiosyncratic artists that Mount Kimbie really prove their mettle.

Raw yet warm, Love What Survives has a distinctively comforting setting. [Oct 2017, p.92]

Here, they sound comfortable as a band rather than an electronic duo who use guitars, with off-kilter songs that nod towards Joy Division and My Bloody Valentine and are full of fizzing synths and weeping accordions confirming their status as one of alternative pop’s finest acts.

Their sound is now driven by a tensile energy that sounds like they've been mainlining the early Factory catalogue. [Oct 2017, p.107]

Though it may seem ironic that for all the glitches, warps and pops of their earlier material, Mount Kimbie find themselves gravitating towards the simplest of beats, Love What Survives is a close examination of how rhythm can define and alter our perceptions of electronic music.

It’s uniformly pleasurable, occasionally stirring listening, and Campos and Maker have excellent taste.

There are parts of Love What Survives that you’ll want to dive straight back into again (like this track), and then others that are a little more ephemeral.

Love What Survives is a grower for sure. Mount Kimbie may never return to the height of those first few releases, but we'll still be here for another while yet.

Categorisable, but mostly excellent. [Oct 2017, p.35]

We’re left with many songs that could have used some voices, or ones where the voices dominate proceedings, taking the focus away from the creators.