Choke Enough by Oklou
"Choke Enough" is the proof that groundbreaking and sophisticated music is like a strawberry: it needs time to grow, you have to nurture it until it's ripe, pick it with care, and then, if you can, turn it into the sweetest jam.
I love when artists make good music. And I'm not talking about well-produced songs; I'm talking about when they get involved in the writing, arrangement, and composition of thought-out, interesting, forward-looking music. That is a very polite way of saying that I am fully aware that most singers don't know anything about how to make and produce their own material. When they say "I wrote a song," it means they wrote a couple of lyrics, and their engineer did everything for them while they sat on the ever-present leather sofa behind the desk, mindlessly scrolling on their phone while someone else did their job for them.
I know this premise has a bit more bite than your average review, but I have a point. I want to talk about Oklou’s album "Choke Enough" because you can tell immediately that it was made by a musician.
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Oklou, pronounced "Ok Lou," is the stage name of French musician Marylou Mayniel, a deliciously mysterious artist who has been quietly paving her own way for the past decade or so. In a soundscape full of bold and out-there personalities, Oklou has taken the road less traveled. Her 2020 mixtape, the nightly "Galore," gently made its way into my most replayed albums of the last few years and did so not by being out-there, but by shining a light on a more elegant and introspective way of writing songs. It was calm and elegant.
"Choke Enough," her debut album, is masterful. There are cool arrangements, medieval melodies, unexpected instrumentation, pure pop strokes, and left-field ideas, all interconnected in 13 songs that seamlessly weave a spider web of sticky, inviting, and inescapable sound.
Doing a track by track review in this case seems a little reductive ("look it up"). The songs manage to feel both different and related; there is an invisible fil rouge (excuse the French, but in this case, it seems appropriate) that keeps the whole project glued together. "Choke Enough" is infused with the same blue hue that appears in the artwork of the album, and it all feels like a late afternoon in the same atmosphere. As a southern European, when I see a window shutter halfway shut like that, it brings back memories... The song "ict" perfectly depicts what I'm trying to describe: a summer's afternoon in the city, careless, a bit boring, nostalgic of an easier time and, at the same time, euphoric. A fragile happy moment, frozen in time.
The muted and soft sounds of the album vividly capture a sweet spot, between memory and dream, that is very hard to find in today's landscape, especially considering how unaware artists are of their own art. While some singers rush to frantically release new and often flavorless music, Oklou takes her time, studies, and composes music that celebrates a much overlooked human need: quiet. I cannot tell you how serene this album makes me feel, especially "Blade Bird," the closing track. I feel just like I'm back to when I was a kid, picking cherries in my grandpa's orchard in late May.
