Review Summary: An acid trip inside a cardboard box
Music Can Hear Us, the 4th album by German house producer DJ Koze, is a bloated beast – it meanders through its overly-long 65-minute runtime and leaves you worn down and exhausted. Once known for an expert curator of features, none of them hit this time, especially the phoned-in Damon Albarn and the puzzling collaborations with Ada or Soap&Skin.
“Wie Schön Du Bist” is a glimmer of excitement, with a rich palette of organic and electronic sounds that actually propel the album’s momentum forward, even if just for 4 minutes. But it is followed up by “Tu Dime Cuando”, a borderline-unlistenable collage of electronic layers and stuttering vocals that go together as well as sashimi and chocolate, and “The Talented Mr. Tripley”, with vocals so unpalatable that you wonder if DJ Koze is trolling you at this point.
In fact, the entire mid-section of the album is like an acid trip inside a cardboard box, there are hints of psychedelic elements but no colours or shapes for the senses to enhance, just an uninspiring blur of brown and beige you feel trapped within.
Music Can Hear Us crucially lacks fun and whimsy, which is something you could never say about DJ Koze’s previous full-length, the vibrant, dancefloor-filling
Knock Knock. “The Universe In A Nutshell” is about as spiritually thought-provoking as Thai massage background music, and “Buschtaxi” transports you to a house party, but at 6am when the guests all start passing out to the sounds of a royalty-free YouTube music playlist.
The album is such an unfortunate mis-step that I’m left questioning the credibility and taste level of DJ Koze as a producer.
Music Can Hear Us leaves me wishing I never heard
it.
