Progressive-eclectic DJs like Gilles Peterson, Garth Trinidad, and Carlos Niño could not have dreamt them up. As out-there as the material gets, rich highlights such as "Laputa," "Borderline with My Atoms," and "Breathing Underwater" are thoroughly winsome, cast in warm light. Its significance is easy to miss through the battle-theme opening, frenetic mass of swirling/zipping synthesizer action, and octopedal drumming.
She gets more personal on late 2014 A-side "By Fire," a burial song inspired in part by her father's house-fire death. The lyrics of athletic vocalist and guitarist Nai Palm, dizzying on their own, mix natural, supernatural, and technological subjects and are delivered in an array of styles. Considering five fragmentary interludes of varying consequence and so much nonlinear structuring within the proper songs, Choose Your Weapon isn't always easy to follow.
Vocal melodies and guitar wriggles sneak up and tickle the ears, burbling electronics mingle with spiny acoustic guitars, time signatures abruptly switch and stun. From track to track, one ingenious idea trails another. The band refines and broadens its attack. Seventy minutes in length, it can be split in half and taken as two volumes that surpass what preceded it. In some ways - literally, for example - Choose Your Weapon is twice the album. Tawk Tomahawk provided a lot to absorb in its 35 minutes. The move worked, at least with Recording Academy voters, who nominated that version for a 2014 Grammy in the category of Best R&B Performance. The young Australian avant-R&B quartet needed it more for visibility than for credibility. When Tawk Tomahawk was picked up by Salaam Remi's Flying Buddha, the label added a bonus version of "Nakamarra" - the album's most direct, traditional song - with a Q-Tip guest verse.
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