Hecq, "Bad Karma"

Hymen
 
Bad Karmais immaculately produced and tightly composed. The sound design isinteresting without flying off into show-off territory and the rhythmsare clean and intricate, always changing to keep songs moving and tokeep interest from waning. The record is engineered with the kind ofcrisp digital clarity that will make hi-fi systems stand up and takenotice, and it’s perfectly mixed to give space to every nuance, tick,drumbeat, and stuttering drone. Alas, this is a record and not an engineering project.

Sure,it’s a great sounding record and it’ll give the bass bins and tweetersa workout and it would serve perfectly as a primer on how to createmodern dance-influenced but not danceable music, but I’m starting tofeel like all of that isn’t quite enough. I rarely buy records tomarvel at the composition and engineering skills behind the mixingdesk, and Hecq, in all of the technical expertise on display here, hastaken out 90% of what I look for in music!

The melodies arealmost non-existent, stripped away consciously so that the music canfocus more on rhythm and structure. That’s fine in a way, but there’snothing here that we haven’t heard before. The beats stutter and buzz,skip and scatter around like a robot drummer with a short circuit, andit’s fun headphone candy, but it doesn’t pack much of an emotionalpunch. The rhythms are buoyed by atonal washes of brooding drones andsynth pads that are nice but not unexpected.

Maybe it’s justthat time of the year when it starts getting colder out and I want tobundle up in the house with a nice warm blanket of comforting soundsand music that pulls at the heartstrings, but I found Bad Karmato be practically lifeless. There are brilliant production moments suchas the integration of ethnic percussion, chopped up jungle breaks, anda bit of call and response rhythm programming, but that’s just notenough to keep the fire lit, I’m afraid.

samples: