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Apr 18, 2025 Web Exclusive By Issa Nasatir

Unknown Mortal Orchestra aimed to provide “possible background music for some strange parties and night drives in your future” on their new LP IC-02 Bogotá. The album doesn’t quite captivate the imagination, and results in just that: background music, not quite weird enough for a strange party, but enough to fill an awkward silence on a late night drive with someone you only kind of know.

IC-02 Bogotá (IC standing for Improvisation, Collaboration) is the result of UMO’s trip to the city in its title, and a collection of ideas it helped them plant, develop, and nurture. The fully instrumental songs follow the general themes of their titles—earth sounds like earth, heaven is heaven, and the underworlds are underworlds—but they fall short as diluted ideas of those pungent places.

“Earth 1” begins promisingly, throwing us right into a jungle-like chaos of polyrhythmic percussive elements and looping flute and bass, but that developing thought remains remarkably stagnant throughout the song’s 10-minute runtime.

The rest of the three Earth tracks reside somewhere between Khruangbin and the mix of a DJ at an LA wine bar’s grand opening. The songs grow legs but don’t stand up, sometimes experimenting with intricate percussion and left-field sounds, but never using them as a means to explore other interesting avenues.

“Heaven 7” is the interlude between the earths and the underworlds and fittingly the nicest on the ears with its minimal percussion and dreamy synth sequence, but it comes off sounding like a shuffled track off of Mac DeMarco’s One Wayne G.

Finally descending into the “Underworld,” the first two songs set the stage for something that never shows, but the outro “Underworld 6” quickly regains faltering intrigue. The song centers around an enthralling drum pattern that takes a bongo-infused page out of Squarepusher’s book. It darts in and out of guitar and synth loops, never overstaying its welcome. However, even this track takes too long to get going with its 14-minute runtime; its build to a stressful intensity with the introduction of a panicking trumpet fades away just as fast as it begins, and the album lands just a few feet from the finish line.

Pieces of IC-02 Bogotá’s puzzle are missing, and while it introduces interesting ideas, Unknown Mortal Orchestra do not follow through on their experiments, and instead leave them malnourished and unexplored. (www.unknownmortalorchestra.com)

Author rating: 4/10