m-flo - KYO
KYO is m-flo’s 9th studio album and features their usual mix of musical styles, trends and future/sci-fi imagery, but most importantly welcomes the return of singer LISA to achieve the ideal balance between the cutting edge and personal tradition.
Over a career spanning 20 years, m-flo has gathered a lot of different fans as they’ve never adhered to a single genre, touching everything from pop, dance, rap, R&B, garage and breaks, and in their most recent guise they were heavy on the EDM accompanying its dominance over the last decade. So with the return of LISA the question was always going to be would they return to their roots or continue to pursue a harder club sound?
As it turns out, the answer is kind of neither. While LISA left in 2002, it’s not like they went into a stasis chamber and made something exactly the same (even though long time fans would have been pretty happy with that). With Taku and VERBAL’s continued work in production for other artists, DJing and remixing, they’ve stayed on top of all the prevailing trends and delivered a progressive up-to-date m-flo album that still features their unique signatures like tempo changes, strings and harps, bilingual wordplay, digitized samples, vocal back and forth and sci-fi pop culture references (“Blade Runnin’ from 2001 ’n back”).
The result is a little something for everyone, like the reggaeton influenced “Toxic Sweet”, the urban R&B vibes on “PULSE”, the current chart-friendly “HUMAN LOST” and even drum and bass on “MAKE IT BREAK IT”. But you’ll also hear Spanish courtesy of J Balvin, VERBAL using different flows to match his contemporary peers, and LISA’s voice is subject to more digital manipulation. In typical m-flo style no song can be pigeon holed into a specific genre as they usually employ an electronic/digital angle for a futuristic version of current trends. It feels both new and familiar at once, fluidly shifting between past, future and present. And for further proof of their influence and timely connections, the second CD is a non stop mix by in the blue shirt featuring remixes from some of the best and brightest DJs and producers around today like starRo, Sweet William, tofubeats, Kan Sano and WONK.
This diversity suits the modern age where people can pick up single tracks and slot them into playlists, skipping anything they don’t dig. In fact the bulk of KYO comes from two EPs released since 2018. But that would do this album a disservice because it’s designed as a listening experience with intros and interludes, building from a reintroduction to the group to a recap and emotional conclusion at the end.
More importantly the heart of the album lies in its central concept of KYO. The album’s logo is a highly stylised version of the character “響” (echo) but they use the more versatile reading of KYO which has the same sound in words like 音響 (acoustics), 共鳴 (sympathy/resonance), 狂気 (madness), 今日 (today), 東京 (Tokyo), 鏡面 (mirror surface), 境界 (border), 協力 (co-operation). It hints at being something that they’ve been searching for over the last 20 years of partying and contact with different races and ideas through time and space, as a group or individually. In the end it’s a little bit like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz or Chihiro in Spirited Away, “KYO is always in my heart” sings LISA. But that realisation is always only ever earned after a long journey, and listening to this album in the context of their large body of work makes it so much more satisfying.
For better or worse, the last three albums had Taku and VERBAL partying on the edges of the galaxy, jumping onto whatever was hot and making as much noise as possible with any form of life available, but with LISA back on board it feels like they’ve come home to humanity, settling back in orbit around this planet. It only took 15 years to figure out (or maybe they knew the whole time) that although two’s company, three is KYO*. No question.
*as in 最強, the strongest