Kid Koalas Creatures of the Late Afternoon is a futuristic sci-fi love story designed as the soundtrack to a family-friendly board game packaged with the albums vinyl issue. Compared to the ambient pop albums and soundtracks he released during the 2010s, the music sounds much closer to the scratch-happy sample collage hip-hop of his earlier work on Ninja Tune. Like his more recent recordings, however, the album is devoid of samples of other peoples music. Koala recorded himself playing numerous instrumental parts, cut the stems to vinyl, and constructed the songs using turntables. He achieves a vintage sound heavy on fuzzed-out 60s garage rock guitars and crunchy breakbeats, and makes it all the more postmodern through constant scratching and effects trickery. Opening track "Hear Now" builds a sense of mystery by inserting a voice repeating code words, similar to a numbers station broadcast, into a slow, swarming beat. A pair of self-referencing interludes taking place in a robot hotel make it clear that Koala clearly came of age during the post-De La Soul era of hip-hop album skits. Several of the best songs feature guest artists (most of which are curiously named after sea creatures), and they sound faithful to certain eras and styles of music while also deconstructing them. The punch-drunk "1000 Towns" (with Coelacanth) recalls Koalas 12 Bit Blues album, while "Things Are Gonna Change" (featuring Lealani) is an exuberant, Go! Team-like cheerleader anthem, and the Crayfish-assisted "When U Say Love" is a Spector-era girl group flashback. "Lets Go!" has a gaggle of distorted voices scratched around a skippy beat and simple, catchy organ melody. "Jump & Shuffle" channels Jamaican ska and rocksteady, while the much moodier "Once Upon a Time in the Northeast" appropriately has spaghetti Western-style guitar and harmonica. After the dramatic battle sequence "Rise of the Tardigrades," the album ends with a wayward, bittersweet doo wop ballad, "Til We Meet Again." Kid Koalas music remains as inventive and conceptual as ever, but Creatures of the Late Afternoon is the most stylistically varied, adventurous, and straight-up fun release hes made in ages. ~ Paul Simpson

Rovi