KikuyuHunter Gathered
Indie

- I don't know much about the organ which Ms. Sez Wilks - known as Kikuyu when she's not one of Melbourne's Surly Mermaids - rescued from certain obscurity and neglect when she plucked it from a dowdy op-shop. I do know it is Italian, actually it's called a Baleani Audiosonic and that with it she can pull off feats, impressive feats. If you listen to that single of hers, Infodome, she makes it do a very fine impression of 8-bit chiptune, while on the silly Latin of Summer Helicopter she has it go all cutely casio, with its cheesy built-in beats: as fine a bit of twee-sploitation as I've heard. Her voice proves to be a very effective counter-weight to all the synth sweetness. Wilks has the same broad Aussie dipthongs as Holly Throsby and some of that same quality of the world-weary songstress, too. As you get to the further end of the album she even explores some territory which proves to be quite tense and complicated - check out tracks like If I Stretch and especially Gumtree, which after five minutes of uncertainty resolves into the rather lovely Swimming Blue, the album's final track, featuring the addition of a warm guitar and some of those vocal harmonies that Kikuyu is so good at. For the most part Hunter Gathered's gently-paced music strikes a pleasing balance between the sweet and sour, the happy and the sad, and as you get to the end you feel you've been privy to something much deeper than you'd expect from your standard synth-pop record. It's probably not synth-pop at all - more like a kind of synth-folk. In an intriguing and rather unexpected way I don't think there's much else out there quite like Kikuyu and I'm really rather glad to have heard it.

KikuyuHunter Gathered

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