Halo Halo – Halo Halo

Halo Halo's follow-up to last year's 7” is a playful, adventurous listen. The clean, double-pronged chants on Djeddjehutyiuefankh (have a go at pronouncing that) are initially joyful, but they're filtered through weird vocoder effects at the song's tail-end. The South London trio often threaten to go to darker places, but they keep it together in favour of poppiness and accessibility. Take Eagle, which mixes aggressive rhythms with earworm melodies, or Mata Mata, which throws colourful synths and euphoric instrumental grooves over Rachel Horwood's tribal vocals.

 

Alluring banjo melodies and meaty bass-lines merge with the modern math-rock shuffle of Jack Barraclough's drum beats across these twelve tracks. It's a successful experiment in merging rustic ideals with current trends, but as the LP reaches its mid-point, songs begin to recycle messages and ideas. Less of a concise experience than it could have been, but there's enough gold scattered throughout to make Halo Halo worth wading through.