Blue Hawaii – Untogether

By Thomas Murphy & Kenny McMurtrie

February 28, 2013

Following the release of their eight track e.p. Blooming Summer in 2010 Blue Hawaii are back with their new album entitled Untogether. The Canadian duo composed the album apart, perhaps offering some explanations as to the name of the album, yet have managed to combine different elements and maintain one unique sound. Without throwing around the terms ‘post dub step’ or ‘post garage’ the sound is hard to pin down to one specific genre however it’s more accurate to say the album emulates sounds similar to that of heavyweight producers SBTRKT and James Blake.

The stand out track for me is ‘In Two’ (albeit this is actually split into two tracks …). ‘In Two’ starts off slowly with a fairly progressive drum beat to match, laced with soothing vocals with multiple harmonic overtones. ‘In Two’ provides a perfect platform for its counterpart ‘In Two II’ to take over and switch up the style with its use of steel pan drums on this upbeat and bass heavy track when compared to the more ambient sounding ‘Sweet Tooth’ or ‘Sierra Lift’

Untogether is an album that uses the less is more approach, without there actually being too much going on in the songs (opener ‘Follow’ goes through a number of warbly phases without really amounting to anything approaching solidity but at least ‘Try To Be’, which comes straight after it, has proper verses and not just mouth music and is all the better for it). What they do have going on though makes for a cool and largely chilled out album that’s worth more than just a cursory a listen.

Untogether is out on March 4th and available from amazon and via iTunes.