Hippo Lite

With moments of sheer chaotic genius married with brilliant songwriting, ‘Hippo Lite’ offers something new on every listen.

If you’re someone who needs music to ‘click’ the first, or even second, time you hear it, then Hippo Lite is perhaps not for you. But for the more patient amongst us, give it some time and you will surely be richly rewarded.

It is a fairly bizarre album, but an absorbing and clever one that gets stranger as it goes on.

Very often Hippo Lite feels like wandering into Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley’s tossed off living room recording session.

Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley sound blissfully removed on their second album as a duo, in a quizzical world of their own creation. This one’s best played late at night.

What remains most alluring about this experiment’s broken logic is the sense that you’re furtively occupying someone else’s dream.

Hippo Lite is as refreshing as one can expect from Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley but this time around, the drinks this pair are serving have a bit more bite.

The results border on “rough cut,” as if five or six of the album’s twelve tracks were fully developed and meant as anchors for Hippo Lite’s more spontaneous and quirky output.

Like Hermits on Holiday, it's first-rate experimental rock made by two musicians with interesting, complicated ideas and the skills to bring them to life.

The second album from Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley carries the same sense of freedom as their first outing, this time a bit softer and more song-shaped than their debut’s meanderings.

In a quest to discover simple living free of consequence, Le Bon and Presley can, at times, get lost in their own little bubble. Still, it’s hard to pinpoint another act who recalls DRINKS’ vividly weird, cinematic strain of pop.

Hippo Lite is too uneven an album to have their sound be both musically freewheeling and enjoyable enough for the listener in its eccentricities. It may not be short on ideas, but its focus can sometimes be left to drown in that sea.