Review Summary: feel the ground beneath your feet again.
A crystal clear stream flows over chiseled slate beneath the overhang of lush fern and sacred vine. You breathe deep, inhaling the spirit fires of your ancestors as you gaze upon the tropical panorama before you. Harmonious waves of blissful peace caress the shores of your mind as you exhale into the floral humidity of your thriving environment. You begin to drift off into the oceans of your soul, but just before you reach the open waters of your stilled mind, a quake of sub-bass rattles your bones to attention. It's time to move. It's time to shake the dust out and sway away the anxiety and dissonance of the past and future. It’s time to dance ourselves straight into the present moment and feel the ground beneath our feet again. It's time to enter the world of CloZee's
Harmony.
It hasn’t taken long for Chloé Herry to rise to prominence in the world bass scene, and for good reason. Her music has always carried a gorgeous penchant for exotic strings and percussion that pour right from the fountain of inspiration, and her intoxicating marriage of glitch hop and future bass with ethnic elements brandishes a personality that is unmistakably her own. “Secret Place” exemplifies early on that
Harmony is going to be a more angelic affair than her tribally driven
Revolution EP which leaned on driving rhythms and angular movements far more than this current offering. Those shamanic forces are still present of course, but this time around the emphasis on violin and woodwind drive the future bass leanings into a more radiantly celestial plane. Underscoring these aesthetic principles with keynote finesse, the exemplary use of pitch shifted vocals and acoustic guitar on “Lonely Island” seamlessly integrate the quieter choral and symphonic keys into the bombast of the song’s big-room bass drops with ease. The rest of the EP follows suite in… well,
harmonious fashion, and as a whole it flows beautifully from one track to the next with each cut offering variation without losing focus on continuity. It sails over temperate mountain ranges and bushwacks through tropical valleys until it blooms like a lotus flower at its peak with the impressive “Black Panther”, whose synth-washed bass lines underpin what may very well be the heaviest track she’s made to date. Stirring up memories of the climactic “Aspara Calling” from her prior release, it carries all the emotive pastels of the album’s modus operandi, and injects a cathartic release of energy into the arrangement with an ethereal-woodwind-section-meets-heady-dubstep jaunt that neatly surmises everything that gives CloZee such a mesmerizing command of a dancefloor.
Just as always,
Harmony sees the rising French producer sculpting a nigh-orchestral depth of arrangement as subtle chimes, bells, birds and angelic voices nestle themselves amongst the instruments. Don’t be fooled though, her music has always been tailor made for the dancefloor and regardless of how organic and mystical it presents itself, the deep waves of bass and cathartic promenades are still the marrow that supplants those silky melodies and picturesque vistas. The result is a rather unique concoction of emotional honesty, hard-hitting beats and psychedelic tapestries of sound that graciously enchant just about any pair of ears that cross their path. Unfortunately, with these instantaneous bursts of sweet flavour come a sugary aftertaste that
just doesn’t quite satiate your taste buds as much you wish they would, and the caveat of its charisma and short run time is a jejune personality that lays all of the album’s gems out in the open. Really though, at the end of the day
Harmony isn’t about harbouring some great mystery or obfuscating an esoteric concept, it’s about letting go and sinking into your happy place. What truly counts is that - for a brisk but entirely pleasant 22 minutes - it’ll have you forgetting all about your worldly troubles as it effortlessly holds a space for you to move your body and heart in blissful unison for a little while.
