Nihiti is a fairly shadowy New York City-based group that has already started to bubble-up on the blogosphere. Head over to their website and you’ll see that they definitely try to cult-ivate a certain aura of mystery with Worship, Emanation, and Prophecy linkages leading you into their world where “Aleister Crowley Becomes The Quietude In The Light” is a generated foretelling of the future. Once you get past these sigh-inducing factors, though, it’s pretty easy to get caught up in what Nihiti have created on Other People’s Memories, their first full-length offering.
For the most part, Nihiti deal in dark and moody instrumental pieces that flow into one another in an almost suite-like fashion. There is a bit of a split personality that plays out over the course of the album, with the A-side focused mostly on organic, piano-driven instrumentation and the flip side on more electronic, dance-oriented methods. Within each side, the sounds vary widely as well. For example, the A-side moves from dark pop (“No Angel Came”) to ominous bossa nova (“Party Of”) to more dance-leaning textures (“The Return of Kind Ropes (Laku Noc, Dusan K)”). When vocals do factor in, as on “The Ringing In (The Sun is Rung),” Nihiti sound a smidge like T.V. On The Radio with a bit more urgency. You can hear some of the same group dynamics over the course of the B-Side, but with noticeable post-production tinkering that you’d swear James Murphy may have lent a hand to.
There’s a certain polish to Other People’s Memories that I’m normally quite averse to, but I can appreciate how fully realized this album is, which nowadays isn’t something you can say for most band’s first full-lengths.
8/10
