Album Review: Lily Perdida by Clue To Kalo

Lily Perdida is dead. At least, I think she’s dead. As the final notes of Clue to Kalo’s Lily Perdida waft from my speakers, eventually fading into the everyday static of ticking clocks and running water that is the norm in my household, I’m left to sit in wonder about the life of the album’s titular main character. By providing us with a barometer that’s little more than a garbled he-said-she-said of ideas and details, Lily Perdida’s unique narrative structure invites us to contemplate the intricacies of this fictional girl’s life without ever truly dispensing enough information to validate or confirm our observations.

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With each album, Clue to Kalo (aka Mark Mitchell) has made significant musical strides. It's One Way, It's Every Way added more structure, vocals, and live instrumentation to Come Here When You Sleepwalk's delicately glitchy melodies, and Lily Perdida sounds even fuller and livelier than It's One Way, It's Every Way did, with brisk, bouncy indie pop that sounds more than a little like fellow Aussies Architecture in Helsinki (who seem to be on the opposite trajectory from Clue to Kalo, adding more electronic elements to their sound with each release). Lily Perdida is also more conceptual than It's One Way, It's Every Way; considering that that album was described by Mitchell as "a musical palindrome" about death, that's saying something.

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As a label, Mush is primarily known for hip-hop and secondarily for electronic music. Following in the footsteps of Marc Bianchi (a.k.a. Her Space Holiday), Clue To Kalo falls squarely into neither genre, starting off with bubbly glitch downtempo and now sounding like a full live band. With his third album, basement genius Mark Mitchell continues his evolution along side partner in crime Ellen Carey from sparse electronic pop depression into a full Animal Collective like sunshine laptop spectacle, only more coherent.

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