Posts Tagged ‘Ives Sepúlveda Minho’

The HOLYDRUG COUPLE – ” Hyper Super Mega “

Posted: October 12, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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It was 10 years ago, in a house on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile, that Ives Sepúlveda Minho and Manuel Parra started playing music together, and The Holydrug Couple was effectively born. A decade later, they’ve made “Hyper Super Mega”, an album that represents the culmination of everything they’ve learned in their years as a band.

If Hyper Super Mega feels like a classic pop record, that’s because Sepúlveda and Parra spent much of the recording process thinking about the classic pop records of the ’60s and ’70s. Masterpieces by bands like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Fleetwood Mac were all reference points, not always explicitly in sound, but certainly in spirit. The duo approached the mythos of the “classic album” from their own inimitable psych-pop perspective, hoping to make a record that felt authentically like The Holydrug Couple that could fit into the same canon. By that criterion, Hyper Super Mega is a massive success. All the elements that made the band’s previous albums Noctuary and Moonlust great are distilled to their purest essence and rendered in obsessive detail.

Not only is Hyper Super Mega the most fully realized Holydrug Couple album to date, it’s also the best-sounding. In the three years since the release of the relatively low-budget Moonlust, the band went out and got a bunch of new gear, including high-end mics and synths. For Sepúlveda, that was revelatory. “It gave me a wider palette of sounds that I wasn’t aware of,” he explains. “That helped me to center more on details and the different emotions that different sounds and ways of singing can give you.”

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That expanded palette led to songs like “Waterfalls” and “I’ll Only Say This,” which trade the bedroom vibes of the band’s earlier work for widescreen pop bliss. Even the experiments, like the electronic-meets-acoustic “Easy,” are as self-assured as anything the band has done. Hyper Super Mega is a capsule history of The Holydrug Couple, incorporating a decade of experience recording, touring the world, and absorbing the sights and sounds of their native Chile. It marks the 10th anniversary of a band whose next 10 years look even brighter.

Releases September 14th, 2018

The HOLYDRUG COUPLE – ” Hyper Super Mega “

Posted: September 14, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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The Holydrug Couple: <i>Hyper Super Mega</i> Review

The new album by The Holydrug Couple, the decade-old music project of Chilean musicians Ives Sepúlveda Minho and Manuel Parra, addresses the constant distractions of the world, whether they be technological, cultural or economical. According to a press release, the band was wandering with a sense of haphazardness, so instead they turned the loud world that caused their mental burnout into their inspiration.

Songs like “Waterfalls” and “I’ll Only Say This” unite modern electro-pop with classic psych-pop and contain lyrics that point to a human race that’s often void of any meaningful connection. On “I’ll Only Say This,” lead vocalist Sepúlveda laments a world that’s addicted to technology (“Resting on a bed made of screens / Anywhere that you can find it”) and full of self-important people that think they know everything.

The harmonious pop vocals of the title track are reminiscent of Jagwar Ma’s Gabriel Winterfield, the twisting distortion and joyful, animated vocals of “Waterfalls” harken back to Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, while the lush psych of “Chevalier” has rumblings of Innerspeaker era Tame Impala. The album’s strongest chorus appears on “I’ll Only Say This,” which explodes with such beautiful, rhapsodic melodies and Sepúlveda’s detectable vocal conviction.

The record’s swirling layers of guitars, bass, vocals, percussion and synths are very dense, which works to both their advantage and disadvantage. The title track bursts with diverse, bright sounds, but “Ikebana Telephone Line” feels claustrophobic with its vocals overshadowed. As for the record’s instrumental interludes, “Lucifer’s Coat” charms with its clash of Medieval keys and electro beats, but the sci-fi flick vibe of “Western Shade” feels misplaced, as epic as it sounds.

The words that make up the album title point to both the album’s vibrancy and dark underbelly. On one hand, those flashy words reflect the album’s rapid paintball fire of colors and on the other hand, those words are indicative of the record’s lyrics that reflect an exhaustion from uber capitalism and unrelenting sensory overload.

They might have used a lot of bells and whistles to get the distorted, feverish electronic-psych sound of Hyper Super Mega, but they manage to retain and evoke so much humanity—and perhaps that’s this record’s greatest strength. They don’t use a wide palette of sounds and effects as a crutch—rather they use it as a vehicle for transcendence and as an high-spirited expression of society’s rife conundrums.