Mahi Mahi: (re)Move Your Body

Mahi Mahi is an art school duo from Providence, Rhode Island with all the electronic do-dads that you would expect from a veteran dance music team fresh from a stint on Ibiza. But in spite of the classic techno array of crisp drums, electronic beats, synthesizers, and heavily processed vocals, they play what could only pass for dance music in New England.

According to their label, the pair plays their array of electronics without the benefit of sequencing, but their songs nevertheless sound as if they were plotted on graph paper. Every beat lands perfectly on time, and their music has so little swing that they make Kraftwerk look like Duke Ellington. Mahi Mahi are a dystopian of vision of what popular music would have looked like if the blues had been just passing fad in favor of a good ol’ waltz.

Mahi Mahi sound best when they rock out like Trans Am on “654321”, but run the same risks that Trans Am often does. The strict emphasis on the downbeat and the unvaried synth phrases leave no room for improvisation and get the tracks stuck in a morass of repetition. I found a lot of catchy little trills, such as the opening to “Forever Endeavor”, but they soon wore me out after a minute of the same few notes over and over.

Singer V.Von Ricci’s processed vocals rely heavily on an underwater reverb that twists their songs into a darker, goth/industrial style. And the lyrics certainly point in that direction. Take the song “Daughter of Sam”, for example. “I am the Daughter of Sam, the sacrificial lamb on the alter[sic] bleeding.” Though it’s been several years since I last listened to Meat Beat Manifesto, if Mahi Mahi had caught me while still in the throes of adolescence then they might perhaps have reached me in the same way.

Mahi Mahi’s music isn’t all that bad, just unremarkable. The only real tragedy is that the duo spent so much on equipment and then never bothered to really learn to use it. (re)Move your Body relies on newly-acquired gadgets without concentrating on mastering any particular technical musical ability. Synthesizers can be dangerous to fledgling musicians. The sounds they produce often sound so neat and unusual that it can seem as if the musicians don’t really need to write complex music, with intricately and intelligently layered and interlocking musical parts.

It’s a telling sign that almost every song, and nearly every song part, has a slightly different electronic sound but never develops beyond the first riff. Most songs’ opening notes are also their catchiest, and you feel as if the band scrolled through every preset sound and wrote a song for each one they found and liked upon first hearing. Synthesizers offer the temptation to create a single weird sine wave and call it day, leaving the listener with nothing but a lazy bit of underdeveloped minimalism. Mahi Mahi has potential, but whether it’s that of the equipment or the band members remains to be seen.