Hippo Campus scrapped the original form of “Flood” two weeks before the version we have now was released. After five years worth of teasing new material and months of touring, Hippo Campus decided that they didn’t like the sonic direction they were pushing, and wanted to start over from scratch.
“Flood” is an album that is directly influenced by a want to make something simpler and more personal. Hippo Campus felt like they were starting to mature not only as a band but as people, so instead of wanting to sound “sophisticated,” they wanted to make something they enjoyed making. A word I’ve seen thrown around a ton in interviews and writing about the band’s new approach is the “rawness” of “Flood’s” sound. I didn’t interpret this in the album, as the album feels both over and under-produced. To me, “rawness” is used to justify the unfinished state of the album, as there are parts that sound both over and underproduced.
While Hippo Campus’s work has always had interesting mixing and production, it seems like there was a dip in quality with “LP3” that dipped even further on “Flood”. It sounds messy and amateurish in a way that it really shouldn’t be for a band’s fourth foray into making a full-length project. For an album that wants to be a far more “raw” experience, the decision to use whatever combination of autotune and vocal layering they chose is, frankly, not working. On tracks like “Brand New,” the engineering is so poorly done, that Jake Luppen sounds out of tune.
But the problems with the mixing are not just in the bizarre-sounding vocals, the mixing is bad in other ways too, every so often it seems like they decided to make the guitar far too loud compared to everything else going on in the mix. Coming from a big Bob Dylan fan, I think that the harmonica on “Corduroy” might’ve been a bit much. I could hardly hear any bass on the project, and it seemed like the only thing that was more or less consistent was the drumming, even if it sounds like they just ripped the drums from Phoenix’s “Lisztomania” on “Paranoid”.
On top of that, for an album that is supposed to be the band’s thoughts and feelings laid bare, “Flood” finds Hippo Campus writing confusing lyrics to the point of absurdity. It seems to me that the lyrics on “Flood” are just an attempt at creating a general idea of emotion like heartbreak or the bittersweet feeling of aging, rather than actually providing anything of substance. That approach to lyricism can be effective for an album, but it just feels antithetical to what Hippo Campus says they are trying to do.
Now “Flood” does certainly have good moments. Some of its more simplistic songs are quite nice, and they prove themselves as fully capable of producing fantastic sonic builds. But that arguably makes “Flood” a more difficult listen. There are some very clearly good songwriting chops on display here, but they are either ruined by poor lyricism, or poor mixing or are just squandered by incoherent songwriting choices. A perfect example of this is on the song “Fences,” where an incredible crescendo begins to form with a distorted guitar that contrasts really well with the light poppy bounce of the song fading slowly into the background. Which is then sadly ruined at its peak, so we can go back to the amateurish-sounding vocals and generic writing present in the song. This chain of events happens far too much on the album, which is really a shame. It feels like the band is coming into this album with the assumption that raw equals better, but then they make all the best-sounding sections of the album the sections with excessive pedal usage front and center.
Hippo Campus is a band whom I know and enjoy for innovative and fascinating takes on pop music, and while I will always be supportive of artists or bands trying something new, “Flood” is not as much a step forward as a fall flat.
I rank it at the bottom of my personal “Albums named “Flood” ranking,” losing out to They Might Be Giants, Stella Donnelly, Boris, and Herbie Hancock.
