Butterfly Effect

Bass music duo Koven, consisting of producer Max Rowat and vocalist Katie Boyle, drop a fairly unambitious LP on Monstercat.

Largely drum n bass and drumstep, with a few electropop and melodic bass tracks sprinkled in here and there, "Butterfly Effect" aims for quite a simple beauty. Katie's vocals spearhead the album from front to back, lending her powerful voice to powerful lyricism and powerful emotive expression you often find in more vocal-oriented projects like these. But let's cut to the chase — because I don't have many other good things to rattle off — "Butterfly Effect" is simply just not that interesting. Koven does aim for a 'simple beauty', but somewhere along the way they lost the ability to make this project consistent. Of course, some of these tracks are actually rather evocative — perhaps the melodic dubstep of "Gold", or the majestic "Worlds Collide", or even the cinematics of "Speaking Through Smoke Detectors" — but "Butterfly Effect" as a project finds itself missing the mark just a little too often. I have to reiterate that nothing here is actually offensively bad, just that this LP seems to have a problem with holding my attention. Katie's vocal, however good it is on paper, tires out quite quickly, and the production seems to take a backseat for the majority of the record, doing no favours to keep it interesting other than a few half-hearted switchups (alright, I know the heavier switchups are technically not that good, but for some reason I kind of dig "Followers" and "Shut My Mouth". Still, my original point holds). What's worse is that Koven also make no attempt whatsoever to soften the blow with some kind of narrative, something I'd have loved to see in a vocal-based tracklist like this one, but alas, something that does not seem to be considered. It's a shame, really — Koven are a fantastic duet act, one of the most prominent in the electronic scene currently, and it'd have been great to see them do something more with "Butterfly Effect".

But honestly, some of these individual tracks are very good. "Butterfly Effect" may be a weaker album holistically, but it's perhaps a stronger album on a track-by-track level, since most of the tracks only struggle within the context of the larger record, performing just fine on their own, particularly as Katie does put a lot of emotive impact into her performances. And so whilst I won't be returning to the album, you can bet a very large sum of money that a sizeable majority of these tracks are going in the playlist — and rightly so.