Koushik
Out My Window
Release Date: Sep 30, 2008
Genre(s): Indie, Electronic
Record label: Stones Throw
Music Critic Score
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Album Review: Out My Window by Koushik
Fairly Good, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
Koushik's first album was a collection of EPs, and while it worked well as an introduction, it fell short as an album. Not so with the follow-up: 2008's Out My Window is an enveloping hug of blissed-out melodies, gentle beats, hushed vocals, and carefully constructed musical backdrops that casts a spell of peaceful harmony that is difficult to shake. Not that you'd want to.
Based on rating 7/10
When Koushik’s EP Be With appeared on Stones Throw in 2005, press surrounding the disc suggested that the album was a teaser for a full length LP that was right around the bend. Be With contained enough lush hip hop psychedelia to brace the nerves for such an anticipated release, though there was also a fair share of underestablished sketches that signaled a potential disappointment should Ontario’s Koushik Ghosh be hasty with his programme. With such unresolved expectations lingering within listeners, it was quite a surprise, then, that Koushik would drop off the face of the earth for three years before finally making it back to us with that promised album.
Based on rating 2/5
Apatchwork of dusty percussion, pastoral harmonies, windchimes, mellotrons and a host of other instrumentation, Koushik Ghosh's debut album is a sequence of interesting ideas that somehow adds up to much less than the sum of its parts. There is a touch of 1960s psychedelic pop here, a smidgen of spacey soul there, and a looming suspicion that Koushik has been listening to far too much Panda Bear: he shares with that act a tendency for timorous irresolution, all detail and little point. Moreover, most of the album is swathed in hazy reverb; initially, this is pleasingly disorientating, but ultimately proves anaesthetising.
Opinion: Very Good
Koushik melds blunt, funk-inspired drumming with an atmospheric, almost shoegazing texture in an attempt to join the orderliness of hip hop’s rhythm with the expansiveness of psychedelia’s hum. It is a method that should be jarring. But on Out My Window, Koushik searches for — and at times strikes — the fine balance between structure and flexibility, rigidity and looseness, body and soul.