Blue Hour - Ipsiom

The good: Ipsiom puts you in a calm frame of mind for his 2024 EP "Blue Hour", a quiet set of downtempo-leaning tunes with liquidy colour bass influences. I think it's quite clear where the strengths of "Blue Hour" lie — to put it simply, the mood. Ipsiom hits the bullseye on his mood-driven approach, and the result is impressively accurate: reflective ponderings on a cold winter's morning, a pooling of unkempt emotion and frosty synthwork. The colour bass is an interesting decision for its typically harder-hitting tonality, but it works out surprisingly well, and Ipsiom wields a certain liquidy sound design brilliantly. Combined with the prominent vocal chops and a couple of nifty vocal performances, Ipsiom has captured something quite special with "Blue Hour".

The bad: Sadly, it's not perfect. "Blue Hour" is marred by the fourth track, "Letters To You", deviating from the quieter tonality just long enough to feel like a notable sore thumb in the tracklist. "Letters To You" represents a breakage of what would otherwise be a near impeccable mood and atmosphere, but it's also representative of another flaw — that being the tendency for the vocal chops and sampling to be slightly annoying; whilst "Letters To You" is perhaps still the worst offender in this regard, many of the other tracks suffer from overused chops.