Live Review
Kllo @ Black Bear Lodge
- I struggle to find the right words to describe Kllo and, I think that’s because they’re...seamless. So smooth your mind might fail to engage with what it’s hearing, instead just opening the floodgates for the endorphins to pump in and carry you away.
That’s kinda what it was like at Black Bear Lodge, a very blissed out scene. Describing them as some kind of aural sedative is hardly fair, though, because Kllo do a lot to set themselves apart from every other woozy electronic act out there. Their smoothness isn’t the downtempo neo-soul that has spawned a thousand Chet Faker clones. Nor is it the euphoric, over the top insanity of trap-dance a-la Hermitude. Instead it borrows the dreamy, hypnotic mood of the former and takes its cue from dance beats that are older school house and techno.
It explains why they’ve scored a reasonably prestigious signing to Ghostly International: medicated dance music is their main game. It doesn’t really explain how Kllo came to exist: the duo’s beat-maker, Simon Lam, comes from acts including I’lls and Nearly Oratorio, downtempo outfits that are known for quite DIY and experimental impressions of the style. Somewhere along the line Lam must have decided he’d rather be doing beats that were, basically, the opposite of everything he’d done before. A pretty savvy idea as it turns out.
His slickly effective beats, paired with Chloe Kaul’s understated but sweet pop vocal made time evaporate. Even when they had a rare stuff-up -in recent single Bolide I think it was, the bass kept triggering prematurely, forcing a halt- it barely ruffled the thoroughly happy mass of gently swaying bodies before the stage.
Actually, one of my few complaints of the evening was that everybody was so chill that dancing wasn’t really an option. It is actually dance music! I came to get down, but I may have been one of the very few. Kllo are an unusual act on the Australian scene and a very welcome change. It might be a bit difficult to think critically in their presence -or dance- but these are prices very much worth paying.
- Chris Cobcroft.