Steve Aoki - 4OKI

Steve Aoki
4OKI EP
2016
Spotify

Steve Aoki is good. He has his own record label, was one of the pioneers of modern EDM and continues to tour with his friends worldwide. At 38 He is almost a dinosaur in EDM yet he continues to push both his own work and that of those on his label. Hence we arrive at this new EP 4OKI. This record in all honesty is not his best. For most of the record it feels like the most generic Vegas Pool Party you have ever been to. The music is not all that inspired instead it is just memory of people having a good time. There was a point where this "futurist" sound may have been the latest and greatest but now it just seems played and boring. Sitting at a table and drinking over priced vodka may lend itself to Aoki's style but for the rest of us you would never put this on an everyday playlist. "Dope Girlz" is maybe the most offensive in it's super generic message about drinking with "dope girls". It's not like Aoki has lost a step or changed his style all that much, it's just that his sound does not inspire anymore and where He used to give us a glimpse of what music might be in the future, now it feels like time has passed him by. You expect fun and frivolity from Steve Aoki but what he delivers on 4OKI is really just kind of boring.

The record however does give Aoki an opportunity to push some of his fellow Dim Mak label mates with a different one being featured on all four tracks. Their contributions however cannot be all that much as everything on 4OKI sounds very much like Aoki's style. "Kids" is the one point where we actually get a little bit of invention but it just descends into a build drop track rather quickly. What you love about Steve Aoki is how childlike and innocent he approaches music, it's all about fun for him. But this record never has that sense of fun, it ends up just being a slog. At only 16 minutes you would expect the record to just fly by but it crawls and crawls along never really reaching any sort of conclusion or precipice. There is always going to be Aoki haters out there because of his cake throwing antics, but He always could fall back on some really solid music to prove himself. It seems like those days may have gone, but 4OKI is simply bad.

2.1 out of 10