Hiatus Kaiyote, Love Heart Cheat Code You may think you’ve never heard of Hiatus Kaiyote, but you probably have. Kendrick Lamar, Drake , and Beyonce and Jay-Z have all sampled songs from the Melbourne quartet. They’ve been up for Grammy Awards three times, becoming the first Australian group to be nominated in the R&B category.
And they’ve been lauded by the likes of Erykah Badu, Questlove and the late Prince. Hiatus Kaiyote consists of singer Nai Palm, bassist Paul Bender, keyboardist Simon Mavin, and drummer Perrin Moss. Credit: Rocket Weijers So, apart from those in the know, how can they still be something of a cult band in their own country? Part of it probably has something to do with their genre.
Or, rather, the inability to comfortably place them in any single genre. They get tagged as R&B, or progressive R&B, or neo-soul, or future soul, or funk, or jazz-funk. Suffice to say, they’re not easily categorised.
When you learn that they played their very first gig in 2011 at a masquerade ball that also featured sword swallowers, fire twirlers and gypsy death core bands, it kind of makes perfect sense. They work with odd time signatures, glitchy rhythms, loopy atmospherics and liquid instrumentation. So, no, you can’t put Hiatus Kaiyote in a box, least of all their lead singer, Naomi Saalfield, who goes by the appropriately explosive stage name Nai Palm.
Her striking appearance of tribal-meets-anime facial piercings and Egyptian-meets-Kabuki style make-up, is echoed by her gymnastic vocals, which soar, slide and swoop at unexpected moments. The group’s last album, 2021’s Mood Valiant, was made at a particularly difficult time. For a start – the pandemic.
But on top of this Saalfield was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery. When the record was released it was difficult not to equate the shimmery uplift of many of the songs with a new sense of hope after enduring a dark time. “Please believe me when I say, someday it’ll be OK,” Saalfield sang on Stone And Lavender , an uncharacteristically simple piano-based ballad that found her at her most direct.
While Hiatus Kaiyote are musically as slant as ever on fourth album Love Heart Cheat Code, it does find them in a more unified state of mind. “I’m a maximalist,” Saalfield says in the album bio. “I complicate f---ing everything.
But the more you go through things in life, you become more relaxed and uninhibited.” They open proceedings with Dreamboat, which acts as a two-minute curtain-raiser and prelude for what’s to come. Inspired by visionary jazz harpist/pianist Alice Coltrane, it features twinkling piano, a crescendo of strings and the glistening tones of harpist Melina van Leeuwen, while Saalfield’s lofty vocal intones “Here I am, dreamboat, take me home.
” Lyrically, Saalfield is both reaching for the stars and seeking human connection from song to song. Telescope, which rides a ticklish rhythm and burbling bass line, was inspired by a NASA website where each band member typed in their birthday to see what the Hubble telescope photographed that day. It also cheekily borrows a line from The Temptations’ My Girl .
The following track, Make Friends, stemmed from something said by the wife of Mario Caldato, who mixed the album in LA: “You don’t make friends, you recognise them.” Saalfield uses this as the kick-off point for a meditation on friendship, set to a 12/8 jazz-rock feel. It’s telling that a song about the simple act of walking around in a great mood while listening to music through headphones (Everything’s Beautiful ), and a song about classical composer Dimitri Shostakovich, who allegedly heard atonal melodies because of shrapnel that had lodged itself in his brain (Dimitri) can both sound equally slippery, woozy and off-the-wall.
There’s no doubt that the band, which includes bassist Paul Bender, drummer Perrin Moss and keyboard player Simon Mavin, is so musically adept that it borders on the precocious. At times you’re reminded of arguments about Steely Dan, whose fans lionise them as the ultimate in studio perfection, consummate musicians who built a bridge between jazz and rock, and detractors pillory them as bloodless muso-bores who are too clever for their own good and play too many chords. Hiatus Kaiyote could easily start similar arguments, but Love Heart Cheat Code does find them baring more soul and exhibiting more heart, even as they continue to be intent on bending things out of shape.
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