Hippo lite

"Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley sound blissfully removed on their second album as a duo, in a quizzical world of their own creation. This one's best played late at night ... Hippo Lite is an album of peculiar grace: a mini-odyssey in quiet post-punk experimentation, brought to life with playfulness, eccentricity, and sly compositional sophistication".

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"It is a fairly bizarre album, but an absorbing and clever one that gets stranger as it goes on. The ornate, cascading piano melodies in Corner Shops demand a microscope to see exactly how they're knitted together, while Real Outside uses a needling guitar and the kind of lurching violin last heard on the Raincoats' debut album to create a strange, ritualistic two-step that suggests the rules of some lost game".

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"Hippo Lite won't make anyone forget Le Bon's fine solo albums or Presley's many other guises, and it's definitely a side project, full of excess and stray bits, but it's never overindulgent or worse, boring. Like Hermits on Holiday, it's first-rate experimental rock made by two musicians with interesting, complicated ideas and the skills to bring them to life".

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