Review

Hudson Mohawke

Chimes EP

Warp • 2014

From a Nintendo DS-screen straight onto the big screen. Since ever Hudson Mohawke started making music, he has put loads and loads of coals into the engines of his songs, until he had finally turned from a nerd to the co-founder of a kind of trap-music, which Baauer’s »Harlem Shake« helped pushing into the mainstream. Kayne West is a regular visitor when he needs more kawoom for his tracks, and HudMo’s latest single »Chimes« has recently been used for an apple-commercial. The white boy with the long shirts has become a global player, eventually. And still, the »Chimes EP« is his first actual release in more than three years. So what does someone do who has just returned from Yeezus’s kingdom? Of course: he puts some self-consciousness as a cherry on top and celebrates it in an even broader manner than before. Hence, HudMo’s sound has remained the same, but now the horns reach even further into the very last corners of the room and the drums are even more powerful than before. The fact that HudMo might have had a nibble of Kayne’s hubris is mostly shown through the EPs set-up: there are only three tracks and a remix, and one of the songs even serves as an interlude, in which HudMo has put aside Gorilla’s drums for once and instead makes a few synth-lines snog while tumbling. In the end, the EP leaves us with the impression that the producer just didn’t have enough ideas to fill the screen. It all – and by all we’re talking about two and a half songs – seems too familiar and too close to the things we’ve all seen before.