Blue Hour (Ipsiom)

Look at the cover art. Look at it very closely. Did you look at it? By some sonic miracle, the music attached to it sounds exactly like how it looks.

The good: Ipsiom puts you in a calm frame of mind for his 2024 EP "Blue Hour", a quiet set of downtempo-leaning tunes with liquidy colour bass influences. I think it's quite clear where the strengths of "Blue Hour" lie — to put it simply, the mood. Ipsiom hits the bullseye on his mood-driven approach, and the result is impressively accurate: reflective ponderings on a cold winter's morning, a pooling of unkempt emotion and frosty synthwork. The colour bass is an interesting decision for its typically harder-hitting tonality, but it works out surprisingly well, and Ipsiom wields a certain liquidy sound design brilliantly. Combined with the prominent vocal chops and a couple of nifty vocal performances, Ipsiom has captured something quite special with "Blue Hour".

The bad: Sadly, it's not perfect. "Blue Hour" is marred by the fourth track, "Letters To You", deviating from the quieter tonality just long enough to feel like a notable sore thumb in the tracklist. "Letters To You" represents a breakage of what would otherwise be a near impeccable mood and atmosphere, but it's also representative of another flaw — that being the tendency for the vocal chops and sampling to be slightly annoying; whilst "Letters To You" is perhaps still the worst offender in this regard, many of the other tracks suffer from overused chops.