The GB Album Club 055 - Choose Your Weapon by Hiatus Kaiyote

Duders! Welcome to the 55th edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! Last week, things got very classical and very Soviet with Dmitri Shostakovich. This week, we get the beautiful love child of prog and neo-soul in the form of Choose Your Weapon by Hiatus Kaiyote! This album was selected by yours truly, and you can listen with the following links:

Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/album/3qzmmmRmVBiOuMvrerfW4z?si=LSEFNLSRTnmW-grp_Uer8w

Apple Music:https://music.apple.com/us/album/choose-your-weapon/972218237

Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mxQdlK-tNsc1GCJG5XZ64I3fQBBt5ijv4

You like music? You like unofficial clubs on video game website forums? You like heading over to a discord and submitting an album to be selected at random to be listened to and discussed every week? I know you do, so come on down! We have five albums left in this cycle, but if you want to nerd out until the next cycle comes around, we're here for that!

I was not a huge fan of this one.

So, a lot of what I dislike about this comes down to the vocals. They don’t work for me. I guess this is just R&B style vocals? A little bit of rapping here and there? We’ve had a few rap albums before and this winds up being a similar story to the rap albums I’ve listened to – at worst, I’m OK with what all the instruments are doing, at best I actually kinda really like it, but something about the vocals makes by brain go “please make this person shut up” and that ruins any interest I might have had in the song as a whole.

I understand that most people would find that odd when put up against my usual metal interests, but there’s something about the cadence of the vocals that don’t work for me. They’re all punchy in the wrong places and far too often, if that makes any sense. “Wrong” for my brain, not “wrong” as in “bad”, I don’t think any part of this album is bad in any kind of “objective” sense (at least as far as that term can go when talking about art). I just think that me trying to like this style of singing is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I’d like to say that I can look past the vocals and just listen to the music, but I can’t do that – those vocals are placed front and center and given the most attention. They’re what your brain is meant to focus on first and foremost, they’re the star of the show, and nothing else ever takes precedence over them.

“Shaolin Monk Motherfunk” is a fantastic name for anything, though.

The closest thing to this album that we listened to was “Transient” by Gaelle, and I think I liked that a lot more than this. At this moment, I’ve begun to listen to the first song on it and… yeah, this works for me way better. I remember my feelings on this album being up and down, though.

It was 2015. I was in my first year of living in Los Angeles, and I just bought a big ass lego set. (Specifically the modular movie theater. I was going to launch into my usual reasoning as to why I still like Lego, but then I remembered that this is a video game website and I don't need to feel insecure about my nerdy shit.) When it arrived, I decided to spend the day listening to albums I hadn't listened to before and building the set. I got 8 albums in that day, I built that entire theater in one sitting, and I honestly consider that day one of the best of my adult life. Or at least the most peaceful. Also by some miracle of probability, I really liked all 8 of the albums, and this was my favorite.

I love this album. I wrote a top 10 list of albums that year on my Facebook and I put it at number 2 under To Pimp a Butterfly. But to give an even more specific quantification of my love for this album, I listened to it so many times in the period after that fateful Lego day that the thought of listening to it again made me want to puke after a while. This is my first time listening to it in years.

Back in the day, I was a full 10/10. Now I would say I'm at a 9.5/10. Really more like a 9.98/10, but as long as we rate albums with numerical scores, I like my scales clean.

It's two things that have led to this ever-so-slight dip in my fervor for Choose Your Weapon. The first is that brain like it when band go very fast, and I think they slow things down ever so slightly too much in the middle portion of the album. The second is that now I live in a world where their third album Mood Valient exists, and in comparison, Choose Your Weapon doesn't seem as adventurous in hindsight.

But I still deeply love this album. In a lot of ways, this album's a bridge from the part of my brain that loves soul music to the other part that loves nerdy stuff. And not just because there's literally a song about Miyazaki and another that ends in a chiptune solo. I listen to this album and hear a bunch of people who are just as joyous about R&B as I am and can't contain it in their own work, and it just makes me feel like a kid all over again. It's a perfect marriage of the aesthetic of neo-soul and the compositional elements of prog, it's vibrant and soundlessly energetic but also achingly romantic, it's most of what I look for in music in one album. I just love it.

Also I disagree with @justin258 about Nai Palm's voice.

Favorite Songs: "Shaolin Monk Motherfunk" "Breathing Underwater" "Molasses"

P.S.,

The 8 albums I listened to on that Lego building day, in the order I listened to them (I keep a list of everything I listen to):

1. Vince Staples, Summertime ‘ 06 (A different Vince Staples album is coming later this cycle. Also I found that old top 10 albums of 2015 post I made and I put this at number 6.)
2. Hiatus Kaiyote, Choose Your Weapon
3. Young Fathers, White Men Are Black Men Too
4. Ibeyi, Ibeyi (Number 5 on my top 10 of 2015. Might pick this one for a later cycle.)
5. Death Grips, The Powers That B
6. Jamie xx, In Colour
7. Skyzoo, Music For My Friends
8. Alabama Shakes, Sound & Color