video review: 'hill climber' by vulfpeck

So yeah, this was a mess... not my thing either so I expect the backlash, but eh, it happens.

Next up... yep, let's finally talk about SABA here - enjoy!

album review: 'hill climber' by vulfpeck

So here's something a little alarming about my job as a critic, and I'll walk you through the scenario. Say you're given a band, primarily promoted through Bandcamp so you'd assume they'd be a small-to-midsize act, and you've never heard of them. Fine enough, that's not uncommon if they're a step outside the mainstream or never have gotten Pitchfork coverage, so you start digging through their back catalog... only to discover that this band might be a lot bigger than you could have expected, with collaborations with named critical darlings and a social media presence that might actually guarantee an audience for the review... made all the more awkward by the fact that you really didn't like what you heard going through that back catalog!

And yes, this was my experience with Vulfpeck, an American funk act who broke out in the 2010s and have quietly been pumping out albums throughout the decade. And when you see the list of session players who have worked with them, it's a little astonishing that I hadn't heard of them sooner. Indeed, I can imagine some audiences are more familiar with how they were backing Darren Criss on his 2013 tour than the fact they had worked with Bootsy Colins, Bernard Purdie, and David T. Walker. Of course, if you're in the music industry you probably know them for having trolled Spotify in 2014 by putting an entirely silent album online in order to game streaming, which got them about twenty thousand dollars before the album got pulled, but in all due honesty, there are points I'd prefer to listen to that than their larger recorded output. Yeah, this is where things get awkward because I would struggle to say I'm a fan of Vulfpeck at all: limp production, underwhelming vocals unless they pulled up a credible guest, and with generally embarrassing lyrics that might just wind up as some of the most safe and sterile attempts at funk I've heard in a long time. Yeah, the playing is good, but with no edge or intensity or sense of greater texture, it got grating fast, and when you couple it with their social media presence which makes it hard to tell if they're a joke act that just so happens to have a few ringers who can play really well... well, that's not the sort of act I really feel the need to cover. That said, they slowed things down significantly for their album last year - it was more limp and boring than actively grating like The Beautiful Game was but at least was tolerable - but this new album has gotten some good reception, so what did we get from Hill Climber?