3 out of 5

Label: After Hours

Produced by: Griffin Rodriguez (mastered by)

I’m… curious about this decision. HiM’s Peoples is a delightfully woozy album, filtering all of the band’s (i.e. Doug Scharin’s) previous shifts from post-rock experimental to jazz-funk to electro dub to world music melting pot through a somewhat streamlined, grooving, Thrill Jockey / Chicago lens; More Peoples followed as an addendum, taking select tracks from Peoples and resequencing them, then adding two additional cuts from a separate recording session, two years after the first recording. Peoples was not on wax, so it’s nice to have some of that material in the format, and it does look like this was remastered (Griffin Rodriguez is credited here, while Alan Douches worked on the originals), but still, I can’t quite tell what this is; what the intention was. The new tracks are different enough to stand out, but both songs also sound like codas to Peoples’ sessions, fairly stripped down and repetitive; that is: they stand out, but not in a way that stands out. In this sense, the resequencing follows, changing the rather grabbing nature of the original album into something more chill, which Rodriguez’s mix supports, downplaying the drums greatly and leaning into the album’s warmer sounds. But I just don’t know what to do with that. I am, likely, too familiar with the original album to assess this effectively, though I generally like experiments like this that attempt to recontextualize. However, the recontextualization here, to me, lessens the impact of this music; it has no peaks. It’s very background. If we’re completing some cycle where Peoples remarried HiM to post-rock, then More Peoples takes another step back towards HiM’s early minimalism in a way, which is definitely an intriguing twist upon HiM’s – at the time – very active sound.

I dunno. The fact that this didn’t feed into the next couple albums really makes this feel like an opportunity to get a couple of unused songs out there, in a way that would net some more attention than doing a 7″ or something, and maybe Peoples + 2 wouldn’t fit onto one LP. Resequencing and remastering is a nice touch, I’m just not sure the material (new and old) synced up well with that approach.