Review Summary: #review
I find it very difficult to take Ta-ku’s new album seriously, so this review will avoid using serious words. Instead, we will be using #words.
Songs to Make Up To follows 2013’s
Songs to Break Up To, which marks a long break for an artist who was able to crank out six full lengths the year before. Their subjects are pretty self-explanatory, Ta-ku doesn’t really do subtle, so we can take from them the fact that this lover from Perth is doing better for himself after taking time to turn down the intensity. During this downtime he still managed a collaboration with Jaden Smith, so maybe that gave him the self-respect and sense of dignity he needed to get back on the market.
Like its two-year-old cousin,
Songs to Make Up To is all about them #feels and #vibes. It’s another album about #love, so much so that I am finding it difficult to prise the two apart content-wise. The track titles have changed, sure, and maybe his choice of collaborators now crone about slightly different things, but this is the same soppy mix of Soulection-esque LA #beats, future garage, #strings and vague oriental influences. The album positively #twinkles in its feverish attempts to self-validate.
I say this because I’m not entirely sure how genuine this emotion is. The album could be about pretty much anything, and in place of any actual personal content Ta-ku throws in every cliché in the book. Take track one, "Hopeful": one minute of music-box keyboard, one more of synthesised strings and a final minute of a typical LA beat progression. For those counting, that’s three full minutes of #cringe.
It’s a shame, because if he dropped the greeting card company attitude Ta-ku could be creating much more substantive material. The JMSN and Sango collaboration "Love Again" has the makings of a tactfully moody, stripped-down neo-RnB tune, but he just can’t stop himself from indulging in an ADHD intensity of harmonies. Clever, because attention spans are always getting shorter, but for the rest of us it sounds a bit silly. Whatever relief comes with the lyric-less outro is then brutally butchered by sickeningly cheesy synthesised strings – so no respite for the tasteful.
High points come towards the end of the album, with "Sunrise/ Beautiful" hinting at a long-overdue level of strut and "Fall4You" introducing some more relaxed and less desperate ideas, making for a much cleaner, if still clustered listen. Unfortunately, the #feels come back with more #vibes than ever in the finale, which completely kills the #mood.
The harder you look at
Songs to Make Up To, the more it seems to handle its subject with all the tact of pubescent poetry. There is no real voice here, just a collection of the kind of things you would expect in a beat album about love - #feels that don’t sound so felt. We are left wondering whether the only real goal all along was achieving a particular aesthetic; imitation, not creation; a soundtrack to an Instagram feed, not to be taken as anything but vaguely pretty.
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