London's
Beaty Heart are a four-piece band that formed at Goldsmith College as an audio-visual art collective, so perhaps it isn’t too surprising that their 2014 debut album,
Mixed Blessings is, in fact, an arty, psychedelic pastiche of world music, Afro-pop, and indie-electronic sounds.
Beaty Heart make music that's all neon colors, bubbling percussion, stitched-together sampled sounds, peppy backing vocals, snapping fingers, whistles, and very light guitar. And, as every member of the band is a drummer, most of the songs center squarely around an established rhythmic pattern, or at the very least, the percussive nature of the cuts are what stands out the most. It’s a sound that has its precedent in the bright, Afro-pop-infused angularity of '80s
Talking Heads and
Graceland-era
Paul Simon, as well as the similarly inclined work of such contemporary acts as
MGMT and
Vampire Weekend. Lead vocalist Josh Mitchell has a light, pleasant vocal style, reminiscent of
Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig, minus the darkly literate soul searching and a more guileless sense of joy. While you'd never mistake their music for actual Afro-pop (
Beaty Heart are first and foremost British art school hippies), the band almost seems to directly call out their World Music influences with a trio of hypnotic, latter-album jams including "Yadwigha's Theme," "Muti," and "Lekka Freakout." Overall, however,
Beaty Heart deliver a batch of buoyant, almost childlike cuts with titles like "Banana Bread," "Seafood," and "Kinder," ultimately revealing a wealth of jubilantly creative ideas. ~ Matt Collar