Choose Your Weapon Hiatus Kaiyote
For fans of Hiatus Kaiyote, funk-soul-hip-hop-prog Christmas has come early. The quartet's much-anticipated second album, Choose Your Weapon has gone up for streaming listens a week ahead of its official release date, and so now anyone with an internet connection can enjoy the cosmos-skimming expanse of their maturing sound.
On the new LP, Hiatus Kaiyote stretch out beyond the future-soul label they've often been stuck with, touching on a sound that's at times smoother, and at others much more aggressive than the rollicking post-Dilla soul we heard on their previous effort Tawk Tomahawk. Choose Your Weapon asks more of listeners as it veers off into polyrhythmic extended interludes and throws seemingly endless salvos of synthesizer lines in all directions. It's also, most obviously, bigger. Its 18 song tracklist offers many more fully-realized songs for us to enjoy, and is the obvious product of three years spent delicately composing, adjusting and tracking.
In a facebook message, the band asked fans to turn off their electric screens while they enjoyed a first streaming listen, writing "The New York Times has our full album streaming on their Press Play site now, turn the laptop brightness off, plug it into a stereo, turn your phone off and take the next 70 minutes with us."
We suggest you do just that, and stream Choose Your Weapon in full over at The New York Times. With the official release date now only five days away, get set for a whole lot more Hiatus Kiayote news coming soon.
UPDATE: The full album stream has been swapped out for 30 second preview snippets of each track. Okayplayer, along with all of you, looks forward to the full LP on May 5th.
