Kllo

Hometown: Melbourne.

The lineup: Simon Lam (production) and Chloe Kaul (vocals, keyboards).

The background: Is garage the new garage? We say that because a few weeks back we were singing the praises of Conducta, a Bristolian in thrall to MJ Cole et al, and now here are Kllo – formerly known as Klo – two cousins from Australia bringing back the sound of young Britain circa 1999-2000. Their music has many of the hallmarks – sweet melodies and siren-sighing over skippy rhythms – of 2-step, although that’s not all they do. In fact, they’re soulful one minute, electro-poppy the next. They could go in several directions: record a neo-UK garage album, or make an album that covers the stylistic waterfront and changes from track to track. But it’s their UKG-ish tunes that are especially beguiling, recalling the extreme-melodic end of things, the likes of Artful Dodger, Craig David and Sweet Female Attitude. As retro-garage exponents go, it’s as exquisite as early AlunaGeorge, with extra experimental flourishes to prove their underground credentials.


Chloe Kaul was flitting between acting and music and her cuz Simon Lam was studying sound engineering when they decided to establish a working partnership. Their first EP, Cusp, did well on the iTunes Australia electronic charts, received millions of Spotify plays and saw them play festivals around the world. That first EP featured Make Me Wonder, evincing a slower form of synth-soul music that got picked up by Radio 1. The follow-up, False Calls, was a superior electronic ballad while Under Lie saw Kllo ranked as Hypemachine’s #2 most blogged artist. It was their first foray with a vaguely garage pace but really it was as much a torch song with a rhythm, hinting at a future solo career for Kaul even if really she works best not out front in the mix, but subsumed by her cousin’s high-gloss hooks.

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The new EP, Well Worn, demonstrates this effectively. Opening track Walls to Build represents a considerable advance in terms of production, arrangement and adherence to the UKG creed. It’s epically pretty, with Kaul swooning “Forwards ... reasons I can’t explain.” We hesitate to call it a chorus – it’s more a gush, a rivulet of rapture. Bolide is the lead track, with over 600,000 plays on Spotify two weeks into its release (the EP itself comes out this summer). Turns out that “bolide” isn’t a synonym for ethereal beat-mastery but another word for meteor flash. It’s hard to make out what Kaul is singing but at a guess it concerns loss of self in the face of natural beauty. Either that or they got wasted one night at a club and hallucinated a fireball (apparently they played their music to Chloe’s mum and she decided it sounded “like ecstasy music”). Meanwhile, Lam obviously knows his way around a laptop, layering the harmonies to lovely effect. The slow, somewhat stoned Sense veers towards the hazy, gauzy R&B of Nao or RZA. On My Name opens with piano notes, hiss, dubstep wubwub bass and a looped female voice repeatedly crying “baby”. Finally, Don’t Be the One is depressed, decelerated 2-step with a relationship-analysing lyric: “Moving on to something we knew ... ” These are love songs that use pop tropes and pay tribute to electronic music-making of the last decade and a half. We can’t wait for the album. - The Guardian

The good news: “Bolide” is easily the best new SBTRKT song since “Right Thing to Do,” and “Walls to Build” is right behind “Bolide.” Both pair slinky UK garage rhythms with flickering keyboard stabs and midsection-caressing bass; singer Chloe Kaul’s voice curls like a wisp of colored smoke, and in “Bolide,” her singing has been sampled and applied like brushstrokes in wide, wet streaks. Both tunes artfully contain their contradictions: bittersweet but invigorating, soft and enveloping but also prickly—half fur coat, half porcupine.

Neither of these songs, however, has anything to do with SBTRKT. They’re the work of Kllo, an Australian duo—cousins, in fact— who make tidy fusions of bass music and R&B. They released their debut EP in 2014, and despite having a name that’s hard to wrap tired eyes around at first—that’s “Kllo,” not “Kilo”—they quickly found themselves feted by Radio 1, Spotify, Hypemachine, and Australia’s Triple J radio. They arrived with their aesthetic fully formed: Their debut EP, Cusp, features the same rippling syncopations and deep blue keys as Well Worn, the same breathy yearning and yawning emptiness. They are nothing if not consistent in their commitment to moodily lit, immaculately appointed spaces—to stylish understatement at all costs. The same could be said of the EP’s three remaining songs, which trade 2-step’s skippy energy for dusky boom-bap grooves, eking ethereal R&B out of muted drum hits and limpid piano, all overlaid with Kaul’s smoky tremolo.

Now, the bad news: As wonderfully executed as it is, their new EP also feels a little bit like old news—maybe even doubly so. Back at the dawn of the decade, part of what made acts like SBTRKT and Disclosure so surprising was the way they stoked nostalgia for late-’90s UK garage among a generation too young to have experienced it the first time (and, in the case of many American listeners, who may not have had any idea who MJ Cole and Artful Dodger were in the first place). The garage revival, which unleashed a flood of 130-BPM grooves, syncopated chord stabs, and kindling-dry rimshots, even led to something called “future garage,” a mostly-meaningless term that denoted garage-inspired electronic music with a richer, more vividly 21st-century palette. Part of what makes Kllo interesting—part of the itch they scratch, given that neither SBTRKT nor Disclosure has subsequently managed anything as good as their early releases—concerns, essentially, a kind of double nostalgia, for both first-wave UK garage and its brief revival just a half-decade ago. “On My Name,” another of the EP’s cuts, features actual wobble bass, a sound that American dubstep chased out of vogue not long after Skrillex swept the 2012 Grammys. Perhaps we’ve entered the era of future-past garage?

It doesn’t help that Kllo’s lyrics feel like they've been cut-and-pasted from the final iteration of a long Google translate chain, rendering vaguely metaphorical statements merely doggerel. On “Walls to Build,” they take a perfectly catchy hook (“Forward/ Forward, it’s all here/ Forward”) and undercut it with supporting verses that simply don't make any sense, and aren’t vivid enough to skate by as “impressionistic.” In “Bolide,” a song named for a type of meteor, a chain of assonant rhymes (“Hold tight, hold tight/I’m noticing the mine, I’m noticing the mine/Bolide, bolide/So close to leave the mine, so close to leave the mine”) serves mainly to distract us from the fact that the lyrics simply don’t scan. It’s as though they were so intent upon maintaining their restraint, they forgot that they were singing about flaming chunks of rock and ice streaking brilliantly across the night sky.

None of this is to detract from Kllo’s evident skill as stylists, though; it’s true that Kaul sometimes leans a little too hard on jazz-singer mannerisms, but she never oversells it, and in any case, her husky voice is so warmly agreeable, she could make Yellow Pages entries sound seductive, while producer Simon Lam has an uncommon grasp of dimmer-switch dynamics. If Kllo can come up with ways to make this sound more their own—and carve out sharper, less muddled sentiments in the process—they’ll be a formidable force. - Pitchfork

When we last spoke to Simon Lam, the Nearly Oratorio producer talked about a tendency to place his songs into a particular sonic pocket. Now, joined by his cousin Chloe Kaul in electronic pop project Kllo, the two have released an EP that, while entirely danceable, needs to be listened to with headphones at least once.
The duo doesn’t revert to a using a bunch of different and super weird sounds (not that I’m not into that) in order to show off their production skills. This EP is kind of like watching a puzzle come together, only the puzzle pieces are made out of some sort of melting chrome-cashmere hybrid material. Kaul and Lam create a sonic landscape using pads and drum sounds that are modest in theory, but mixed and spaced in a way that lets each harmonic and deep, soulful oscillation stand out.

On Well Worn, the space between each sound acts as an instrument in itself. And by alternating the use of Kaul’s smooth vocals between Abra-like leads and more instrumental repetitions, Kllo endows their work with the kind of catchiness that will pull your head back above water so you can pulse along to their heavy grooves. Listen below. - Stereogum