Hypoluxo by Kelsey Wagner
With two founding members from Palm Beach County, it’s a homecoming of sorts any time Brooklyn-based Hypoluxo plays South Florida.
The band is in the mold of urbane, post-punk revivalists like Interpol and Parquet Courts. Samuel Cogen’s baritone ripples like that of The National’s Matt Berninger, accompanied by heavy shoegazing guitar from newcomer Cameron Riordan. Riordan manages to churn out garage-like noise on one song and on the next conjure smooth, effects-pedal ambience a la Virginia’s Wild Nothing.
Tight drumming by Marco Ocampo and cool bass lines by Eric Jaso complete the eclectic musical group. Cogen and Ocampo form the band’s core — musical collaborators since high school and, at one point, both residents of Hypoluxo Road in Lake Worth before they moved to New York, taking the street name with them.
Their second LP for the Broken Circle label, “Running On A Fence,” released September 21, is full of songs about emotional experiences from both childhood and adulthood, expanding on 2016’s “If Language” and a four-song EP, “Taste Buds.” With its wide-ranging sonic palette, the new album delivers on a vow Cogen made when he spoke to PureHoney in 2016 and said, “We love the gloomy vibe we have been doing for a while which will never leave, but I want to experiment with different stuff.”
On the new song “Trust Fall,” Cogen takes the listener through the harrowing experience of an almost catastrophic leg injury he suffered in the eighth grade. “I was unable to walk for a year,” Cogen said in an interview with The 405, “and the medication I had to take made me feel so unlike myself during those already awkward years. I hardly knew who I was. ‘Trust Fall’ is about the way I was feeling.”
You can tell these guys are sensitive, and not just by their song lyrics; they identify themselves on their Facebook page by their astrological signs. The band has had its share of line-up changes. John Archuleta, who played on “If Language,” is no longer aboard. (He and former members Anthony Tredinnick and Matthew Hershoff are also identified by their star signs.)
Hypoluxo, DirtBike, Poparazzi and TIME perform on October 12 at Voltaire in West Palm Beach. ~ Olivia Feldman
