DRINKS - Hippo Lite

The Quietus

From behind a slowly drawn pair of velvet curtains, flecked with motes of dust and moth wings, appears a cobbled town square in the south of France. Haphazardly handpainted scenery drops into place: a crumbling stone mill set against a green, rock-lined river. A gentle guitar melody wafts on a warm breeze, as if played by no one at all.

Here begins the radiant 35-minute product of a summer shared by the king and queen of janky weirdo rock, Tim Presley and Cate Le Bon. Their second offering as DRINKS, the album is named for St Hippolyte-du-Fort, the phone- and wifi-free sanctum in which the pair dozed, swum, and noodled Hippo Lite into existence.

DRINKS’s first album, 2015’s Hermits On Holiday, had skill, creativity, wit and two knockout singles, but there were points when its noisy freeform guitar strayed too far into Metal Machine Music territory for me. In the intervening years, a subtle shift has occurred: perhaps Presley and Le Bon have fallen in love? Perhaps - an endlessly more romantic notion - this is just what happens when two people manage to go a month without checking their emails. Speculation aside, whatever’s worked its magic on this creative partnership has done so like a warm room on cold butter: Hippo Lite is somehow softer, more palatable, indeed liter than DRINKS’s previous output, but not at the expense of the punchy attitude, the sense of humour, which has made them so captivating from the beginning.

Hippo Lite’s sparser numbers, led by piano and pretty, almost mandolin-ish acoustic guitar (‘Blue From The Dark’, ‘In The Night Kitchen’ ’Greasing Up’) mutate into the pleasingly jangly, cartoon-spooky sound on single ‘Real Outside’, a Cate calling card of echoey voice and just-the-right-side-of-wonky riffs. Later comes the Hermits On Holiday-reminiscent ‘Ducks’, all yelping vocals and manic, layered fuzz. The whole lot is threaded together by recurrent John Cale strings and a smattering of found sounds: from creaking door through chattering bird, serenading frog and burbling human baby.

I recommend you take advantage of Drag City’s recent (and in some eyes, controversial) decision to make their long-absent catalogue accessible through Spotify, and I defy you not to find yourself yearning for this goddamn delectable cocktail - of sunned limbs, busted violins, warm croissants, cold rivers and spilt Pastis - in even more warmth, in heightened texture. You’ll be hot-footing it down to your local record shop by the third play.

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Mon Apr 16 16:06:10 GMT 2018

Pitchfork 80

Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley sound blissfully removed on their second album as a duo, in a quizzical world of their own creation. This one’s best played late at night.

Mon Apr 23 05:00:00 GMT 2018

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

DRINKS
Hippo Lite

[Drag City; 2018]

Rating: 4/5

DRINKS is the collaborative side project of Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley, truly a psychedelic crossover event for the ages. Le Bon is known for making arresting psych-rock, characterized by mercurial guitar work and her distinctive, Nico-lost-in-the-woods vocals. Presley mostly records under the name White Fence and has a reputation for erratic garage-pop couched in consciously lo-fi production values. Their last record under the DRINKS name was 2015’s Hermits on Holiday, a gamble of irregular post-punk experimentation; less ripping it up and starting again, more just ripping it up for confetti.

Despite sounding like a short-lived soft drink, Hippo Lite takes its name from Saint Hippolyte-du-Fort, a sleepy town in the south of France where the pair retreated to record. Artists withdrawing to relatively peaceful surroundings to fuel creativity can often seem hackneyed, a well-worn trope of the press release, but in this case, it’s something of a crucial detail. The album is saturated with a sense of place; many tracks are littered with unassuming field recordings of the French countryside, croaking frogs and all. Part of its exploratory nuance lies in a conscious evocation of rural, Mediterranean tranquility; surroundings don’t so much inspire the tracks as dissolve into them. Le Bon and Presley flout conventional album architectonics in the name of producing something profoundly, unashamedly weird.

What’s made DRINKS a compelling project thus far is the surprisingly fluid synthesis of the pair’s idiosyncrasies. Many of Le Bon’s motifs are here — erratic chord mutations, that craggy guitar tone — as is the scratchy eccentricity of Presley’s White Fence output. The first few listens of Hippo Lite are baffling — frustrating, even — declaring a nomadic kind of creativity. Ideas emerge and evaporate without ever seeming to really develop. It can seem completely arbitrary in its movements, like a dog who’s just been let out into the sun and doesn’t know what to do with itself first.

Listless opener “Blue From the Dark” is like a lullaby — nothing but sedate guitar and wispy vocals, with the dim presence of a fussing child on the fringes. “In the Night Kitchen” features little more than a lithe guitar and nature’s ambient squawk. The two musicians stretch the dynamics of “atmosphere” to a point of quiet fracture, yet the record has a cumulative effect that’s oddly intoxicating. With multiple listens, you’re gradually absorbed into the pair’s bizarre compositional logic; what’s slowly revealed is a short (30-ish minutes) series of sketches, more humble than glib, evoking surreptitious soundcheck smiles.

“Real Outside” seems fashioned from the silt of Le Bon’s outstanding 2016 album Crab Day, all guitar ricochet and bobbing piano keys. The spidery fingerpicking and processual vocals of “Greasing Up” are reminiscent of the more batshit work of The Incredible String Band, sounding like the pair’s attempt at a foley-ish recreation of a Renaissance fair. Such a jumbled track-to-track progression ends up having the incongruous charm of a charity shop browse. There are Beefheart-esque flights from structural orthodoxy; the avant-pop of “Corner Shops” has Presley’s spectral backing vocals singing of “temporary living conditions,” while guitar fragments are woven into wayward piano. The pair rightly conceive of the avant-garde as something transformative but still fundamentally a sort of game. Otherworldly string arrangements constantly simmer and buzz, recalling the oblique appendages of The Raincoats’ Vicky Aspinall, like on closer “You Could Be Better,” where angular strings act as a strangely grounding influence.

It’s fun to imagine the two sequestered away, recording this album, wrestling with the essential impenetrability of the banal — something like a more interesting, less puritanical Walden. On “Pink Or Die,” Le Bon delivers the inscrutable line “I am the color of here” — at times, the record is just classically Surreal, a bucolic unheimlich provoking a fleeting confrontation with the unconscious. What remains most alluring about this experiment’s broken logic is the sense that you’re furtively occupying someone else’s dream.

Thu May 17 04:05:38 GMT 2018

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

DRINKS
Hippo Lite

[Drag City; 2018]

Rating: 4/5

DRINKS is the collaborative side project of Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley, truly a psychedelic crossover event for the ages. Le Bon is known for making arresting psych-rock, characterized by mercurial guitar work and her distinctive, Nico-lost-in-the-woods vocals. Presley mostly records under the name White Fence and has a reputation for erratic garage-pop couched in consciously lo-fi production values. Their last record under the DRINKS name was 2015’s Hermits on Holiday, a gamble of irregular post-punk experimentation; less ripping it up and starting again, more just ripping it up for confetti.

Despite sounding like a short-lived soft drink, Hippo Lite takes its name from Saint Hippolyte-du-Fort, a sleepy town in the south of France where the pair retreated to record. Artists withdrawing to relatively peaceful surroundings to fuel creativity can often seem hackneyed, a well-worn trope of the press release, but in this case, it’s something of a crucial detail. The album is saturated with a sense of place; many tracks are littered with unassuming field recordings of the French countryside, croaking frogs and all. Part of its exploratory nuance lies in a conscious evocation of rural, Mediterranean tranquility; surroundings don’t so much inspire the tracks as dissolve into them. Le Bon and Presley flout conventional album architectonics in the name of producing something profoundly, unashamedly weird.

What’s made DRINKS a compelling project thus far is the surprisingly fluid synthesis of the pair’s idiosyncrasies. Many of Le Bon’s motifs are here — erratic chord mutations, that craggy guitar tone — as is the scratchy eccentricity of Presley’s White Fence output. The first few listens of Hippo Lite are baffling — frustrating, even — declaring a nomadic kind of creativity. Ideas emerge and evaporate without ever seeming to really develop. It can seem completely arbitrary in its movements, like a dog who’s just been let out into the sun and doesn’t know what to do with itself first.

Listless opener “Blue From the Dark” is like a lullaby — nothing but sedate guitar and wispy vocals, with the dim presence of a fussing child on the fringes. “In the Night Kitchen” features little more than a lithe guitar and nature’s ambient squawk. The two musicians stretch the dynamics of “atmosphere” to a point of quiet fracture, yet the record has a cumulative effect that’s oddly intoxicating. With multiple listens, you’re gradually absorbed into the pair’s bizarre compositional logic; what’s slowly revealed is a short (30-ish minutes) series of sketches, more humble than glib, evoking surreptitious soundcheck smiles.

“Real Outside” seems fashioned from the silt of Le Bon’s outstanding 2016 album Crab Day, all guitar ricochet and bobbing piano keys. The spidery fingerpicking and processual vocals of “Greasing Up” are reminiscent of the more batshit work of The Incredible String Band, sounding like the pair’s attempt at a foley-ish recreation of a Renaissance fair. Such a jumbled track-to-track progression ends up having the incongruous charm of a charity shop browse. There are Beefheart-esque flights from structural orthodoxy; the avant-pop of “Corner Shops” has Presley’s spectral backing vocals singing of “temporary living conditions,” while guitar fragments are woven into wayward piano. The pair rightly conceive of the avant-garde as something transformative but still fundamentally a sort of game. Otherworldly string arrangements constantly simmer and buzz, recalling the oblique appendages of The Raincoats’ Vicky Aspinall, like on closer “You Could Be Better,” where angular strings act as a strangely grounding influence.

It’s fun to imagine the two sequestered away, recording this album, wrestling with the essential impenetrability of the banal — something like a more interesting, less puritanical Walden. On “Pink Or Die,” Le Bon delivers the inscrutable line “I am the color of here” — at times, the record is just classically Surreal, a bucolic unheimlich provoking a fleeting confrontation with the unconscious. What remains most alluring about this experiment’s broken logic is the sense that you’re furtively occupying someone else’s dream.

Thu May 17 04:05:38 GMT 2018

Drowned In Sound 70

In a case of life imitating art, Drinks decided the way to follow up their debut — 2015’s Hermits on Holiday — was to seclude themselves in a remote French village to record its follow up. The second album from Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley carries the same sense of freedom as their first outing, this time a bit softer and more song-shaped than their debut’s meanderings.

Hippo Lite, named for the French village of St. Hippolyte du Fort where they recorded the album, has the feeling of benign isolation that comes from intentionally removing yourself from context. It feels like being on holiday, that boost that makes you feel like you can try anything once, manifested here as warped pianos and violins that want to be slide whistles. Even Le Bon’s whoops on 'Ducks' stretch out the quality of her voice beyond a mere test and more towards the realm of knowing that no one is expecting her to be too serious.

Hippo Lite by Drinks

The aforementioned softness, though, is the departure that suggests a break from Le Bon and Presley’s day jobs. While Le Bon’s influence is felt much more clearly this time with her distinctive guitar style making her contributions more obvious — 'Real Outside' sounds like it was skimmed from her Crab Day sessions — much of the album is framed more in the soothing than the ramshackle. Album opener 'Blue from the Dark' could be lifted from a Simon & Garfunkel album if there weren’t a teasing violin and a typewriter thunking away under the acoustic guitar. That same playfulness is felt in 'In the Night Kitchen', whose opening frog croaks are replaced by a soft bass mimicking frog croaks. Album closer 'You Could Be Better' lyrically broaches the serious but is still a skipping melody of jagged violin and loping synths.

Hippo Lite as a whole represents that shift in attitude (or maybe in life) where quirky can be subtle instead of boisterous; where new skills and ideas can be factored in instead of flashed about; where nights with friends involve playing boardgames because you all just want to catch up. Stepping away from what you know can be a raucous experiment, but it can also be scales played on the piano and recordings of children laughing. It’s amazing how a little time away can make these options seem equally adventurous.

![105546](http://dis.resized.images.s3.amazonaws.com/540x310/105546.jpeg)

Wed Apr 25 13:18:45 GMT 2018

The Guardian 40

(Drag City)

Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon first hooked up with California psychedelicist and former member of the Fall Tim Presley for 2015’s Hermits on Holiday. On that album they made the sort of circa 1979/1980 post-punk that was easier to admire than to enjoy, all awkward song structures, self-conscious experimentation and – at times – grating repetition.

Disappointingly, the follow-up doesn’t offer much in the way of progression, with the same flaws still very audible. There are moments of cohesion, most notably Corner Shops, where gorgeous melodies transcend the off-kilter rhythm and the two voices complement each other. Some of the instrumental interludes, particularly the ghostly lo-fi piano piece When I Was Young, impress too. And then along comes the painfully discordant Ducks, with its lurching beat, wilfully tuneless singing and idiosyncratic deployment of percussion. It lasts less than three minutes but seems like an eternity. Leave the Lights On is little better. While Hippo Lite does have its moments, well before the end you find yourself reflecting that Young Marble Giants, Rosa Yemen and the Raincoats did this far better almost 40 years ago.

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Sun Apr 22 07:00:16 GMT 2018