Two years after his well acclaimed self-titled debut, oOoOO has graced us once again with a new EP, Our Love Is Hurting Us.
I spoke in the Lake Radio review last month of the new and interesting directions that witch-house artists were taking the genre. Perhaps I spoke too soon; oOoOO feels like he’s stuck in 2010 still, and has made little to no effort to try and diversify his sound in the two years he’s been away.
Does that mean this is a bad record? Not really, especially for oOoOO fans. Production quality has certainly been improved, moving away from the distorted and lo-fi sounds of his previous; one thing that did annoy me about oOoOO was the clipping on the bass kicks, it spoiled everything. I’m glad he abandoned that.
“TryTry” opens out nicely into huge, slow moving bass as delicate synths coil away in the background and clipped, fragmented helium vocals stutter in and out. It’s a classic witch-house track, and that in itself is not a problem, it’s just that everything that follows is as well.
The tracks with Butterclock (“Springs”, “NoWayBack”) you’d think would show a bit more diversity but no, they are exactly the same. Well, they’re not, but everything sounds so sonically similar they may as well be; everything here just blends into one amorphous mass of bass and choppy vocals.
“Starr” is perhaps one of the most left-field tracks here; while it is still rooted in witch-house/drag with its glacial bass beats and vocoder vocals, it actually brings in electric guitar into the mix (shock horror!). I’ve heard lots of complaints in regards to this incorporation from avid fans, but I actually think it’s pulled off really well. Shame that there isn’t more of it, and that it only feels like an spur of the moment inclusion.
The problem is, as I’ve said, nothing has changed. Two years, 20 minutes of new content and almost nothing to show for it at all. The beats are the same, the song structures are mostly unchanged; this would have been great when oOoOO was riding the popularity wave in 2010, but that’s not the sound we want anymore.
Just so, so average.
5/10
(Not a particularly serious/in-depth review by any means, but w/e)