Hiatus Kaiyote are a hard act to size up, tagged under the banners of all things hip hop, R&B, electronica, prog, and everything in between.
No matter the genre excursions Hiatus Kaiyote explore, there's no better word to summarise their essence than 'soul' – and at their long-awaited Tivoli performance in Brisbane (22 January), songwriter Nai Palm and co. dished it out by the spoonful.As the band burst into latest record 'Mood Valiant''s single 'Get Sun', a swell of bracing pleasure washed the dance floor, virtuoso drummer Perrin Moss's beat sizzling with a summery Brazilian influence.
The tune's infectious jaunt is no doubt in part thanks to track collaborator and legendary composer Arthur Verocai. However, the song and its intent feel distinctly Nai Palm, seeing the group carve their path to delivering a heartfelt message of powerful, physically tangible love.
"And I awake, purging all fear; a task that you wear, dormant valiance it falls around," she waxes on 'Get Sun', beckoning their plot to elevate humankind.
Confirmed banger 'All The Words We Don't Say' brought the house down with elephantine thunder, pummelling air with borderline dubstep heft, disrespecting the sound barrier with fat spankings of plump-slap bass.
One would be remiss not to mention Nai Palm's impeccable costuming – a luxurious, silver-tasselled mirror dress with high-heeled boots to match, dazzling the iris with its shimmering reflections of the beat-synced stage lighting.
Incredible pipes and charmingly kitsch Jackson metal guitar aside, Nai's warm presence and radiant inner energy are the heart of the Hiatus Kaiyote experience, helping the audience to a swagger with equal parts sway, humility, playful humour, beauty, and ritualistic intent.
Gently going deeper into the trenches of the set, Hiatus Kaiyote dug up 'Swamp Thing' from 2015's classic 'Choose Your Weapon'.
Trudging and thumping into the intoxicating thickness of their bayou abomination, the band showcased their love for fusing b-movie horror theatrics with filthy rations of jazz funk. Bassist Paul Bender heavied up the live version, creating thorny spasms of feedback and pitch-shifted howls to punctuate the spaces between his fuzzy licks.
"I feel like most of you in the audience tonight are musicians," Nai probed with a sly laugh, her suspicions immediately confirmed by a near-unanimous cheer from the crowd.
Perhaps it was the constant gushing of oohs and other expressions of disbelief at Hiatus Kaiyote's feats of instrumental muscularity that gave away the musical multitudes. There was certainly no shortage of technical fodder for the jazz kids, with vapours of melted brain forming a pungent cloud as the band embarked upon a remarkably athletic medley.
This patchwork sewn from fragments of astonishing jams and a cover song exploded into a holy union of science and intuition.
Delving into noise-rock, prog territory comparable to, say, Zach Hill's Hella played alongside Steve Reich's 'Clapping Music', the show's eclectic peak was sent off by a spectacular, modulation-heavy bass solo.
While at times you'd find the set jumping frenetically between disparate sections conjoined at the corpus callosum by some shared rhythm, other passages milked every drop from relentless, brooding grooves.
The latter approach was perhaps nowhere more felt than on 'Sparkle Tape Break Up', an R&B stomp with gut-wrenching, soul-punishing sorrow embedded in its sluggish beat, dragging deliberately under the weight of a profound yearning.
"No, I can't keep on breaking apart, no, I can't keep on breaking apart," Nai lamented in the coda refrain, with keyboardist Simon Mavin's synth strings heaving back and forth as the entire audience chanted as one.
With a drastic tremor eliciting waves of collective euphoria, the band's final song 'The Lung' shuffled in like a ghost passing through you.
One of many great masterpieces in the Hiatus Kaiyote catalogue, 'The Lung' pumps, breathes and pulses just like the essential occupation of its namesake. An elegant sway possessed the audience as Palm gracefully leapt between the song's sprawling velvet melodies and the clipped refrain of ". . . quick, quick to lose your furrowed brow".
Hiatus Kaiyote's Tivoli performance was a show so shocking in its excellence that one left doubting if it might ever be topped.
By virtue of their uncompromising individuality, unparalleled chemistry, and determination to share the lifetime of love invested in their body of work, very few bands on the planet can hold a candle to Hiatus Kaiyote.
