Review Summary: this is perfect and i'm in love ((what song is it again??))
is
choke enough a good album? perhaps. to be completely honest, i'm having trouble perceiving and engaging with this body of work as an album. it's music, it comprises songs, but most of all, oklou's debut-ish record feels like a collection of enjoyable bits of sound and little hooks smoothed into oblivion. as an album of moments, it is deeply excellent: “endless” tickles my brain with its silky vocal melodies, “obvious” presents an absolute earworm of a bridge, “choke enough” has enough bouncy bleeps to sustain a
brat afterparty's afterparty, "harvest sky" is as close as we're going to get to an all-out spa banger from oklou etcetc.. full marks, good start.
however, as an album of continuous music, those moments might just shine because of how
tiny everything else is. for a big chunk of the record,
choke enough presents very little to latch onto: the production is so sanitised, so aggressively clean, that its attempts at hook-y alt pop fall stylishly flat. it’s an enjoyable listen, but rarely lifts itself above “vaguely pleasant” outside of the aforementioned moments. there's something deeply nonchalant about its presentation, as though oklou is deeply tired of the delicate balance between organic and synthetic aesthetics she repped on
galore and decided to cater her entire style towards internet-happy soundbytes. a lot of the album sounds like her main intention is to use superficial jingles as a way to bring us into her in-jokes. get a load of "thank you for recording"'s memo-style address or "ict" playfully projecting her heartthrob over the titular cream machine. oklou's long standing love of brass accompaniment is served equal parts synthesised and acoustic, as if she eyeballs the line between where one ends and the other begins and gives it a big
whatever. track 7 has a crying kaomoji for its title yeah.
tl;dr this album is so mid-2020’s e-girl coded that its bladee feature scans as an inevitable inclusion – the only real shocker there is bladee coming real, real close to sounding awake on “take me by the hand”, incidentally one of the most defined
songs in the tracklist. a real moment that is more than a moment, at last. and yet, in spite of this record’s formlessness, i keep coming back to
choke enough. there’s something intriguing about a pop album committed to never, ever popping, while presenting enough cute little bits that are just memorable enough to be able to describe oklou’s music.
