Mood Valiant, Joe

Can I get a light? Because, for the life of me, I cannot see any way to get excited about Mood Valiant.

Alright, sure, I can, kind of. There are various disparate sections and pieces and moments throughout Mood Valiant that make it seem like there is something here, but those sections and pieces and moments never coalesce to form an album that is wholly satisfying.

 

Call it the Willow's Pizza Theory. Last night, we're eating pizza, and while we're fetching Willow's slice, she's saying "I want cheese!" I say, Pam, she wants cheese on her pizza. I ask Willow, "How about sauce? Do you want sauce on your pizza?" "Yup!" "How about crust?" "Yeah!" And so she gets her pizza slice that we made sure had cheese, and sauce, and crust, and then she goes ahead and eats like less than half of it.

In the same way, I could tell you I love strong female vocals, and intricate percussion, and a strong sense of rhythm, and exploring bands I've never even heard of before, and moments when all these things seem to all of a sudden swirl around like a tornado and feel like they are going to spin out of control at any moment. But then I got that type of album this week, and all of a sudden I wasn't really hungry for my slice of Hiatus Kaiyote.

A "quick" word about genre: I feel like, in terms of what my ignorant ass would define as "R&B," we've reached some sort of peak in Record Club this week. I don't know why Wikipedia refused to classify this band as R&B, instead going with the "future soul" bullshit, but c'mon, this is R&B through and through. (Possibly because the band is white? Would classifying an all-white-members band as "R&B" imply appropriation? This is a conversation for a different time.)

Unlike hip hop, which I tend to overthink, and post-hardcore, which is simply unpleasant, or country, which I tend to unfairly conflate with political or cultural ideals that may or may not be directly related to the album we are reviewing, or pop, which makes me feel lonely, I tend to find R&B possibly the most difficult genre to tackle in Record Club, simply because I find it boring, but the genre is for the most part innocuous, which makes my boredom seem insidious, which is not my intention.

But so I'm saying that Hiatus Kaiyote, out of all the quote-unquote R&B artists we've explored so far in our long and endless journey, do the absolute most to lift the albatross off my neck. It's not quite there, but I appreciate the effort. There are moments of exhilaration, which is more than Erika de Casier could say. You cannot deny Hiatus Kaiyote's authenticity, which Destiny's Child came nowhere close to achieving (though that's unfair too, probably, when you consider The Writing's on the Wall was more pop than R&B). And I feel pretty comfortable saying that I don't love Mood Valiant, whereas saying that about Jamila Woods' HEAVN made me feel like such an asshole.

If you've made it this far, I think it would be no surprise to you if I said that I struggled with Mood Valiant this week. I struggled in finding enjoyment, and I struggled in finding something worth saying about it (hence the default modes of talking genre and talking about my kids). It was just one of those weeks in Record Club.

These are the chains that I choose, though. I choose to love. There is a choice. It's not that pleasure leads to love, because then I would feel no love right now. No—it's the other way around. Love leads to pleasure. Choose the love, and pleasure will follow. I choose to love what we do here. I choose to listen to what I'll ultimately deem a mediocre album at least 30 times in one week. This is my choice. Record Club can sometimes seem skullless, comatose, blob-like, with fluids leaking out of its facial cavities, but I choose to love it every week. Even a week like this. Mood Valiant is middling at best, but I still choose to listen to it, because it's much better than the contrary—to not choose, to give yourself over to the pleasure of not choosing, and losing yourself in the process.

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5