I started keeping a list of random ideas and sounds in the newestKattoo record because by the fourth track, the record was already goingall over the place. I'm a huge fan of sample-based music and thekitchen sink approach to constructing records usuallyworks, but here it plays like a hackneyed collection of obviousinfluences that don't add up to anything greater.Hymen
The opening track is a melodramatic piece of orchestra music played allby the canned synths that plague the entire record. People learned inthe '70s that synthesizers made to simulate acousticinstruments were more interesting when they were just being used tomake their own weird sounds, but that's something Kattoo still hasn'tfigured out.
Some of the arrangements are touching and themelodies can be pretty hook-filled, but they are all hamstrung by synthpresets. Electric piano is flat and drenched in reverb so that itsounds almost exactly like the piano tones in Windows XP that tell youwhen an application is finished installing. Strings and synth brass(does anyone seriously try to get away with synth brass these days?)are excruciating and while the songs might have been great had theybeen recorded by a real orchestra, Kattoo seems not to have thatluxury.
Movie samples dot the record and add texture andoccassionally meaning, but they never sew the songs together intoanything cohesive. The effect usually comes off like someone adding Aliensdialogue over a new age record which sounds like the kind ofexperiments everyone I knew with a sampler and a love of Wax Trax werebanging out in 1992.
When there are beats to break up themovie-score melodrama, they are either pulled from the same cannedcollection as the synth patches or cut up in an annoying way in anattempt to posture as contemporary. Take away some of the buzz rollsand micro-edits and you have an Enigma B-Side collection here, onlywith less interesting instrumentation.
When the samples aren'tobvious and overly indicative of the genre aesthetic to which Kattooseems tied, they are so completely out of any context that it sounds asif the author is simply passing through channels on a TV and capturingwhatever bit of randomness catches his fancy. I swear there's even abit of the Alien 3 score lifted or re-created here. Kattoo's haphazard approach tries to throw samples from Logan's Run,anime dialogue, beatboxing, middle eastern melodies, and war moviesound bytes together and if it were trying to be funny, it might justwork. Unfortunately, there's no obvious tongue in Kattoo's cheek.
samples:
Read More
