Hiatus Kaiyote, from left to right: Simon Mavin, Perrin Moss, Paul Bender, Nai Palm
Future soul. Neo-jazz R&B with a little left-of-center hip-hop production. “Multi-Dimensional, Polyrhythmic Gangster Shit.”
Whatever you want to call them (or whatever they want to be called right now), Hiatus Kaiyote released one of the best albums of 2015 thus far with Choose Your Weapon, their follow-up to their 2013 self-released debut Tawk Tomahawk. The descriptors above might seem like the vague verbiage of a hipster music critic, but with a listen or two it’s apparent that the adjectives are strangely accurate. Hiatus Kaiyote delights in taking their music places that seem pleasantly familiar at first, and then smoothly gliding somewhere beautiful and exotic the next moment.
There’s a definite jazz element to their music, for sure. So too are tinges of R&B, soul, hip-hop, funk, rock & roll, flamenco, metal, and folk. They both seem to resist and insist on labels when making their music, which makes them both attractive on a pop-sonic level but intellectually compelling on further listens. Their style has attracted the ears of musicians like ?uestlove and Erykah Badu, but their biggest fan is King of Summer 2015 Chance the Rapper, who not only sampled one of their songs but will also be performing with them on select dates of his Family Matters tour this autumn. Then there’s this tweet:
Whether he’s talking about the Family Matters tour or something else entirely is up to speculation. But the point is that Chance is huge on Hiatus Kaiyote, and you should be too. Being the helpful fella I am, I’ve compiled a mini playlist of songs to help you get acquainted with one of the most unique, interesting musical acts in the world right now.
“Nakamarra” – Tawk Tomahawk
Hannah, my darling,
I will follow you into the sunrise under desert sky.
The obvious entry point into the Hiatus Kaiyote canon is their Grammy-nominated, pop-leaning single off of Tawk Tomahawk. The chiming instrumental—delivered by Simon Mavin on keyboards, Paul Bender on bass, and Perrin Moss on drums—eases you in until frontwoman Nai Palm (the name, I know) simultaneously invigorates and soothes. “Love you, I do,” she croons before hopping and twisting gracefully around the word “Nakamarra.” There’s a remix with a rapped verse by Q-Tip that is good in its own right—but Q-Tip’s offering, while solid, doesn’t blend well enough for me to call it the definitive version. He works on the track, rather than with it. There’s a lot of potential for Hiatus Kaiyote collaborating with rappers, but only one guy has figured out how to do it so far (see below).
“Shaolin Monk Motherfunk” – Choose Your Weapon
So drop into this, honey help me swim right through this.
So drop into this or I’ll be swinging it solo.
The lyrical excerpt above could be read as a plea from Palm to the rest of the Kaiyote collective. The band seems to function as a unit first and foremost—you never get the sense that any member takes precedence over another, which is surprising considering Palm’s obviously strong charisma, showmanship, and vision, which could certainly stand on their own as a solo act. But both in released videos and track credits (every member is credited on every track, a rarity), you get the sense that every member has an equal say and chance to shine.
Choose Your Weapon was a step forward for the band as an album that both fulfilled potential and promised more growth in future works. Tawk Tomahawk is a brief hiccup of a thing that only lasts about a half hour, with very little in the way of coherency. Choose Your Weapon, on the other hand, clocks in over an hour and extends songs with mid-track instrumental and scatting interludes. They wring every second of usable sound out of the album, and “Shaolin Monk Motherfunk” is this case in point.
“Ocelot” – Tawk Tomahawk
My ocelot tongue is sharp and it’ll eat you up,
Leave you looming wild-eyed far cry and wandering in the dark.
Hiatus Kaiyote has a remarkable tendency to get weird when you least expect it, and “Ocelot” is the best representation of that habit. It starts off with a macho drum intro from Perrin Moss, and by all accounts he should dominate the song with the beat he sets. But Palm behaves like an obstinate toddler and diverts the song from a straightforward hip-hop influenced pop song, purposefully wandering into curious “My my my”s that throw you for a loop before she goes back to obeying Moss’s drums. This happens often, get used to it.
“Dare (Gorillaz Cover)” – Performed for triple j’s “Like a Version”
A great example of the original flair Hiatus Kaiyote brings to an already-great jam. “DARE,” as originally performed by Gorillaz, is a thumping dance track, complete with belching “bwomps,” gleaming synths, and liquid vocals by Shaun Ryder.
But Kaiyote takes the attractive keyboard riff and tinkers curiously with it like Play-Doh. It takes the band less than two minutes to contort the song into something unique, only vaguely representing the original.
“Fingerprints” – Choose Your Weapon
This soft, tinkling ballad is both a necessary reprieve from the organized chaos of Choose Your Weapon and a venue for Palm and Marvin to show off a bit. Marvin drives the track with a soulful piano sound, wandering around Moss’s steady presence and Bender’s reliable bass. Meanwhile, Palm gets to act as a subtler accompaniment and displays some of her best lyrical songwriting to date—so good it deserves to be compiled like a poem:
Broken memories
They taunt me like a bird caged by scorched wings
Puzzle pieces missing
The grubby fingerprints that kissed the walls have vanished.
Like the wind without her whisperings
And the colors wept from all her tapestries
Would be left nothing but sullen imagery
The uncertainty of forgotten things.
The phoenix she dies with her wings burning
She sinks from the sky to the earth returning.
But she will rise through ashes singing.
With new wisdom she flies,
With new wisdom she flies,
With wisdom she flies to a new beginning.
“Hiatus” by Chance the Rapper
I am not royalty or giant, just a boy with a rock,
Employer of lawyers boy-oh-boy there ain’t no boy in me Ma!
In what could be the first signs of a beautiful partnership, Chance dropped this tantalizingly brief track right before dropping his landmark album Surf with Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment. This song shows just how well Chance and Hiatus gel together—even without the band actually present to collaborate, Chance’s own unpredictable rhythm coincides at the right moments with Hiatus’s “Fingerprints” sample, and diverts when he feels it’s necessary. Unlike Q-Tip’s “Nakamarra” verse, Chance seems to understand that he’s working with Hiatus, not the other way around, and lets the music dictate where his flow ends up.
Here’s hoping for a collab between the two sometime this fall—if not, we’ll just have to catch them on tour. But until autumn rolls around, let’s just kick back in a tube in a pool, and let Hiatus Kaiyote rock us to grooving, wavy dreams.
Snowcaps, perhaps 
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