choke enough
choke enough
by Oklou
released:
runtime:
: alt-pop, electronic
review written:
: 41x
★★★★★ 5 stars
Marylou Mayniel, a classically-trained French electronic artist, has been releasing music consistently since 2013. This year, in February, she finally released her debut album under the name Oklou. To me, choke enough is a perfect showcase of Mayniel’s music. It’s clearly hers – Mayniel has a very particular brand of minimalist electronic music which has been developing over the years – but this album leans away from the more ambient vibe of a lot of her earlier releases. Choke enough is more trance-inspired; songs are generally more complex and have more of a focus on developing melodic ideas, but that minimalist feel so central to her music is definitely still present.
Take ‘ict’. When I first listened to this album, this was the song that immediately drew me in. The song starts out with a quiet, rhythmic synth note, before Lillian Mille plays a beautifully nostalgic melody line on the trumpet. Mayniel’s vocals don’t start until nearly halfway through the track, where she sings only a few repeated lyrics with a lot of echo and reverb. Slowly, the intensity of the song builds up until Mayniel is singing 2 verses on repeat over a dense and beautiful arrangement of synths, backing vocals, and percussion almost reminiscent of the amen break in its complexity. Finally, the song draws back to its minimal sound it had at the beginning, bringing the song full circle in a wonderful way. The imagery of this song is intentionally very childish and nostalgic: it’s intended to bring to mind a child running after an ice cream truck (hence the song name), seeking the joy and answers that getting that ice cream will bring.
Mayniel’s vocals all across the album are really beautiful. They work perfectly with the instrumentation; they’re soft, melodic, and extremely pleasant to listen to. Her lyrics, too, really add to the album as they are constantly creating abstract images. Talking to Pitchfork, Mayniel talked about how this was very purposeful while writing lyrics for choke enough with Casey MQ, especially with the slightly-nonsensical lyrics in ‘ict’. Mayniel is French, yet all her music is very much in English. She has talked about how even though it can be difficult to write lyrics in a second language with a restricted vocabulary, writing in English is the only way she can write. Writing in English allows her to explore more with language and “just have fun”, as she feels she associates too much meaning to words in her native tongue which restricts her, a common trend seen with exophonic writers. The fact that choke enough is written in Mayniel’s second language allows the album’s lyrics to explore a more abstract feel whilst still being purposeful in the words chosen, creating uniquely honest lyricisms.
The stand out song on the record is ‘harvest sky’, which features underscores (April Harper Grey). It’s more energetic than most of the other songs on the album, taking sonic inspiration from Grey’s own music style. Grey’s and Mayniel’s styles combine into a busy, atmospheric, trance song which would be my song of the year if I were to make a list of that sort of thing. The synths are bright and fuzzy, and the melody extremely catching. The vocals in the chorus mirror the synth line underneath it, cementing the melody even further in your mind. Grey’s verse, too, really adds to the song, and the album, providing a more energetic voice to contrast Mayniel’s softer vocals on the song. She’s not the only feature on the album to provide this contrast: Bladee is also featured, on ‘take me by the hand’ earlier in the record.
The use of synthesizers all across choke enough is fabulous. In every song, the layers of synths work together to create an ethereal atmosphere very reminiscent of the album cover. There’s clearly a lot of focus on atmosphere throughout the record, and the reverberated synths do a lot of work towards this. Whilst most of the songs don’t actually use arpeggiators (as confirmed by Mayniel via Instagram story), you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise; the melodies are short, repetitive, and glide up and down the keyboard in nearly every track in a way which Mayniel has always been a fan of doing, and has truly mastered on this album. The synths take centre stage, literally, at a live performance. In concert, every song sounds a little different from its studio version as Casey MQ mixes the songs live, electrifying the room with more bass-heavy energetic versions that develop the ideas of the original tracks even further.
The album ends on a (slightly) more acoustic note. In concert, she performs the last two songs of the album, ‘want to wanna come back’ and ‘blade bird’ backed with nothing but an acoustic guitar as an encore. These songs work really well to close off the album (and the live show), bringing the energy down without making the songs boring. The whole album is extremely cohesive, and truly gets better with every listen. While at first it may not immediately jump out as something really special, choke enough will creep up on you, and before you know it work its way to the top of your albums of the year list as your 4th most listened to album of all time. Or maybe that’s just me.
| track name | track rating |
|---|---|
| endless | |
| thank you for recording | |
| family and friends | |
| obvious | |
| ict | |
| choke enough | |
| (;´༎ຶٹ༎ຶ`) | |
| take me by the hand | |
| plague dogs | |
| forces | |
| harvest sky | |
| want to wanna come back | |
| blade bird |