I often miss Mayola, the screwball Stillwater outfit that reigned supreme when I first started keeping a watchful eye on the Oklahoma music scene in the late ’00s. Mayola wrote high-energy, high-impact indie-rock and performed it as a tilted, overpacked caravan of rowdy hollers, flippant guitars, and scuffed-up hooks. Their music forever looked on the verge of flipping over the cliff as it cartoonishly weaved along narrow canyon roads, even if it never quite did. The band came to an end but then came Brother Bear, stealing away bassist Antonio Laster and keyboardist Bryan Thompson, who channeled the spacey, experimental-pop bounce of Animal Collective in lieu of Modest Mouse. The offshoot never gained the same level of traction, which might explain why it’s now reconfigured and retooled as Kykuit.
New single “Benzo” is lodged somewhere between deconstructed R&B and hypnotic, pulsing psych, less an opening address than a sneak peak at the pioneering sound palate in which Kykuit will apparently work. Dabbed with glacial trip-hop tones and muzzled horn samples, the track is a cyclical exercise in restraint. Kykuit acts as a student of the poignant school of Oneohtrix Point Never-electronica, simultaneously taking license to create something of a pearly club jam. “Benzo” is settled in the dark sand found five feet deep in navy waters, reigning in the oddball tendencies but letting them squiggle and squirm out of choice pockets. It’s a far cry from the origins of Mayola, but it’s a good thing, reserved to a modern and vital evolution that feels suited to the now instead of yesteryear.
