Memory Tapes – Seek Music : Album Reviews

New Jersey indie-dance sensation Dayve Hawke (also known as Memory Tapes) throws caution to the wind and blurs the boundaries with his highly anticipated debut, Seek Music.

Hawke’s meteoric rise to musical fame has almost been as much a discussion topic as his music itself. As the story goes, Hawke pottered around at home, labouring under the guise of his various monikers, until one day having his music streamed on the uber-cool Gorrilla vs Bear. After a slight name change, (I say slight, given that his two previous titles were Memory Cassette and Weird Tapes – no prizes for guessing how he came up with Memory Tapes!), and a whole bunch of remix offers from the likes of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Taken By Trees, Peter, Bjorn & John, Britney Spears and Michael Jackson, Dayve Hawke now looms as one of the more prominent and exciting prospects in the DIY dance-indie scene. If you are not the biggest fan, his lo-fi  home-grown sound at least offers a story of inspiration for all those budding artists out there with nothing but a dream.

As an album, Seek Music borrows from so many stylistic influences, it becomes tedious to try and determine where one ends and the others begins. One of the biggest drawcards of this album is its ability to infuse this highly atmospheric and dreamy sound with enough pop cleverness to maintain ones interest for the albums entirety.

The biggest reward for the listener comes within the structure of the album itself. Although Bicycle is, by all definitions, a hit success, Seek Music’s intricacies and sonic wonders are found within the entire album journey.

Much has been made of its dreamy, impressionistic landscape, and to a certain degree, these observations wistfully hold in their hand a large serving of pertinence. I would almost label Hawke’s easy-listening fluency to a adequately functioning air conditioning system on a hot day. The music itself doesn’t clutch you within its grasp, yet it does leave with you an experience you’re grateful for having.

The hugely popular Bicycle is the perfect soundtrack for the album as a whole, with it’s not-too-dorky drum pattern, dreamy sound-scape and hazy-guitar twangs, all set against a backdrop of repetitiveness that the listener, once surrendering their conventional song bias, will be immediately drawn in to. Plain Material, funnily enough, satiates the hunger of those more ‘conventional’ appetites, while Swimming Field primes us for the unexpected nature of this prodigious talent.

The album closes with a remix of Bicycle from London goth-punk rockers The Horrors, (which really isn’t as good as it sounds), as well as Walk Me Home; a 17 minute epic  based on the work of John Carpenter – it’s kind of creepy!

The best part of Seek Music is that you don’t feel the urge to determine whether your expectations have been met. Your experience of it isn’t determined by a basic formula of meeting targets, which really helps the listening experience, particularly if this isn’t your genre of choice.

Overall, Seek Music has a universal quality that makes the fact that every band under the sun is wanting to work with Hawke very believable. He currently stands as a talent to watch in the near future.