Drinks
Hippo Lite

Indeed, an album like this is difficult to consider outside of its reference context. I mean, this work truly stems from the choice to "retreat" literally to a specific location away from the Californian daily life, and then this very choice, more or less consciously, ended up influencing the contents of the entire album. This is how "Hippo Lite" was born, the second studio album by DRINKS, the duo composed of Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley (White Fence) who retreated for a month during the recording stages to the town of Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort in the south of France, in the region also known as "Occitania."

In the end, it was a sort of return to nature (or the first experience of this kind) that was idealized by Cate and Tim, who in the presentation of the album wanted to share snippets of their experience: living in an old mill, wood-fired bread, swimming in the river, bird-watching, lots of bugs, frogs and bats, and the fear of scorpions. No Internet and only DVDs of "Jurassik Park" 1, 2, and 3 to watch (this must have been surely the most difficult experience to face). Violin practice. Nearby lives the influential cartoonist Robert Crumb, and perhaps this is not coincidental because in the end, this album is also somewhat parodic, forcefully characteristic, and created with the addition of recordings of local sounds and noises that collide in a lo-fi art-pop form with folk citationism of Paul Giovanni and stuff like the Canterbury scene in garage version.

The final effect is a sort of swamp comic and an album which, in my opinion, succeeds far less than the evident fun Cate and Tim had during their stay in this small characteristic rural center of France inhabited by about three thousand people: a sleepy countryside village made famous by an autobiographical novel by the Scottish writer Janet Teissier du Cros (1905-1990) entitled "Divided Loyalties" (1962) and set during World War II, where Janet lived during that period with her children, separated from her husband (engaged in war) and her family who had chosen to support Vichy France. But here the war has nothing to do with it, unless one wants to think of a kind of revisitation (may Homer forgive us) of the "Batrachomyomachia."