Review: TOKiMONSTA, “Creature Dreams”

TOKiMONSTA, Creature Dreams
Brainfeeder

With Creature Dreams, TOKiMONSTA makes a few tweaks to her neo-trip-hop adventures, most impressively adding loud drums to “Day Job’s” guitar loop, and then closing out the track with an unexpected blast of noisy feedback. She manages a few other modest twists; including a disorienting synthesizer intro for “Moving Forward,” if only to head off an incipient threat of repeating herself (the intro to “Stigmatizing Sex” sounds like “Bready Soul” from 2010’s Midnight Menu). TOKiMONSTA’s stock-and-trade remains buttery instrumental hip-hop that hearkens to the golden era of DJ Shadow and Ninja Tune’s beats and pieces, and she delivers on that count with Creature Dreams in spite of its creeping familiarity. There’s even a song with guest vocalist Gavin Turek called “Little Pleasures.”