Review Summary: ice skating on a frozen pond in March
Back in 2012, Dot Hacker was an outlet for four creatively overloaded guys who couldn't fit their ideas into the vision of any of their main bands. Five years on, and you wouldn't be mistaken to think Dot Hacker have become another band adhering too rigidly to a formula; another main group that these extremely talented individuals need a creative side project from.
That's not to say there's anything noticeably bad on here – hell, if there were, it might even be a reprieve from how placid the majority of the sounds are. Of the opening trio only "C Section" manages to stumble its way onto any form of memorable melody; the other two songs join past stinkers "Aim" and "Slideclimb" as the kind of meandering, circuitous songs that Dot Hacker seem bizarrely fond of putting towards the front of their albums. Fortunately, the album's guts is where we start to hear some gems reveal themselves. "Cassandra" is an honest-to-god beauty, adding to a growing list of piano ballads proudly living in "Communique"'s not inconsiderable shadow; while this new member doesn't break that mould, it's certainly the closest Josh has come to recreating the magic of that particular career highlight. "Found Lost" straddles the line between ballad and banger, with some lovely strings lending some much-needed instrumental diversity to the proceedings. Late-album tracks "Forgot to Smile" and "Beseech" inject some much-needed energy, but feel like the shells of good tracks lost in muddy production and Josh's too-far-away vocals, which frankly are starting to sound a little one-note where once they were the band's biggest strength.
Of course the best tracks are the ones that break away from the frustratingly mid-tempo, aimless format completely, a la
Work's "Whatever You Want" and
Play's trip-hoppy "Memory", still the finest song the band has penned to date. The surprisingly bitter "Minds Dying", resident anti-gossip anthem of 2017, gets by on the strength of its pretty acoustic guitar despite some properly inane lyrics –
"in front of the world's biggest firing squad/at least one of the guns is empty", come on, really? But quite like "Floating Up the Stairs" and "Memory" before it, the album's real stunner is wisely reserved for a spot directly in the middle. "Apt Mess" is a genuine masterpiece, an organ-led groove monstrosity that eschews any expected progression in favour of a delightfully wonky structure which introduces new ideas as fast as the band can master the old ones. Even as the highlight of
N°3, "Apt Mess" feels somewhat like the band have thrown a couple of good ideas into a blender and happened upon a tasty shake; a far cry from the restrained, perfect rawness of pretty much every song on
Inhibition. Josh Klinghoffer may be able to play the hell out of just about every instrument under the sun, and sing like an angel to boot, but sometimes in his sprawling ambition he forgets that the first step is to have a good song on which to build.
