Hippo Lite

It is a fairly bizarre album, but an absorbing and clever one that gets stranger as it goes on.

How she continues to turn apparent whimsy into profundity borders on the miraculous. [Jun 2018, p.92]

Hippo Lite can be thrillingly episodic, like the oddest edges of the Raincoats’ Odyshape or contemporaries such as Palberta.

The beauty in Drinks is that there’s nothing else too close to their sound. With moments of sheer chaotic genius married with brilliant songwriting, Hippo Lite offers something new on every listen.

Hippo Lite is brilliantly abrasive, any prettier blips overwhelmed by Real Outside's uncanny whirl or the ESP crackle of Corner shops. ... Such insularity only means you lean in, however, as close as possible to their intriguing transmissions. [Jun 2018, p.110]

Hippo Lite feels like Le Bon and Presley's own little musical microclimate. You don't have to know exactly what they're on about to recognise that it's something special. [May 2018, p.25]

Very often Hippo Lite feels like wandering into Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley’s tossed off living room recording session. However, the pair have taught us the valuable lesson that weirdness needn’t be conjured under pretense from far out places while the mundanity of real life can prove far more potent.

Hippo Lite is somehow softer, more palatable, indeed liter than DRINKS’s previous output, but not at the expense of the punchy attitude, the sense of humour, which has made them so captivating from the beginning.

Hippo Lite is a genuine collaboration. Aside from a few glimmers, Cate and Tim’s own distinct sounds are less detectable. They’ve ended up with a batch of songs that are physical in an elementally curious way.

While one could say the majority of Hippo Lite’s material is experimental, Presley and Le Bon placed their most avant and uptempo vocal tracks toward the album’s latter half, a block of songs that sort of run together before its closer, the violin-driven You Could Be Better. Consequently, the sequencing feels rushed and impatient. By Contrast, Presley and Le Bon initially want to show you around, the light and airy Blue from the Dark opening the door, slowly introducing you to their muse. By the end, it’s difficult not to feel as though you’ve overstayed your welcome.

The second album from Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley carries the same sense of freedom as their first outing, this time a bit softer and more song-shaped than their debut’s meanderings.

Like Hermits on Holiday, it's first-rate experimental rock made by two musicians with interesting, complicated ideas and the skills to bring them to life.

If one could be so bold, it seems as if Hippo Lite can be proportionately bisected, with the more ambient and dream-like first half giving way to the more biting back half.

At one point, Presley claims, he and Le Bon used the sound of a frog’s ribbit for an instrument. It’s here where Hippo Lite verges towards sounding like music that was only ever made for its makers, rather than an outside audience. In a quest to discover simple living free of consequence, Le Bon and Presley can, at times, get lost in their own little bubble.

This time, there are a couple of solid songs surrounded on all sides by wandering experiments which never quite form into a whole.

While Hippo Lite does have its moments, well before the end you find yourself reflecting that Young Marble Giants, Rosa Yemen and the Raincoats did this far better almost 40 years ago.

None of the songs here are particularly lengthy, but the way ideas evaporate almost instantaneously makes it a slog of an album. It doesn’t help that one-third of the tracklisting is made up of befuddling interludes, with only one (a reprise of another, no less) offering any intrigue thanks to some well-rendered telephone rings.