O how you vex me, Dayve Hawke. You vex me because I know you are just one person, yet two of your three alter egos have names in the plural. When talking about you I know I should be all "Memory Tapes is..." but see, that upsets my pedantic semantic circuits so much that if I didn't like you as much as I do I wouldn't like you very much at all.
With the release of ‘Seek Magic’, Dayve Hawke has assured himself that no matter what moniker he decides to record under in the future, people will be listening.
No one ever wants to admit that summer's totally over, but it's even tougher this year considering how fun it all was-- seems like every other day, an evocatively named band would come about and contribute to this glo-fi/dreambeat/chillwave thing that was perfect for those unbearably humid August nights rife with possibility, imagining an alternate universe where the narcotic of choice in danceclubs were Galaxie 500 and Saint Etienne records.
On this mostly splendid debut ... Hawk actually fuses two of his previous recording identities bridging the shiny electronic of his Weird Tapes alter ego with the hazy lo-fi psychedelia of its "feminine" mirror image, Memory Cassette.
On Seek Magic, Hawk's synth-based constructions occupy a space halfway between reflective IDM and a hip dance party.
After a month of digesting Seek Magic thoroughly, oscillating wildly between manic enthusiasm and a kind of defiant distrust of this whole act’s shtick, I’ve committed myself to the stance about which I felt most comfortable from the beginning: this is a very good album, but there are certain things about it with which I take issue.
1 | Swimming Field 3:30 | |
2 | Bicycle 5:19 | |
3 | Green Knight 4:33 | |
4 | Pink Stones 3:54 | |
5 | Stop Talking 7:04 | |
6 | Graphics 6:31 | |
7 | Plain Material 4:50 | |
8 | Run Out 4:39 |
#16 | / | Drowned in Sound |
#23 | / | Pitchfork |