Connan Mockasin / Devonté Hynes: Myths 001: Collaborative Recordings

Myths 001 is the first of a planned series of collaborative EPs on Mexican Summer intended to pair "mutual admirers and kindred spirits," and the label will be hard pressed to find spirits more kindred than the two it landed for this inaugural installment. On his 2013 breakthrough as Blood Orange, Cupid Deluxe, Devonté Hynes conjured vapory, psychedelic R&B that played like a bizarro soundtrack to water-warped VHS recordings of early Cinemax After Dark broadcasts—the same aesthetic New Zealand's Connan Mockasin shot for on his own LP from that year, Carmel. Like this year's No Life for Me from Wavves and Cloud Nothings, the EP gathers two like minds whose tastes and skill sets overlap so fully that partnering them almost seems redundant.

There's enough variation in how Hynes and Mockasin approach their leftfield pop to create some interesting contrasts, though. Hynes is the more polished and more versatile of the pair, an industry songwriter-for-hire who, for all his iconoclastic tendencies, has long been tempted by Top 40's allure. Mockasin's recent process has been more hermetic: He recorded Carmel entirely alone in a hotel room in a foreign city, and next to the open-armed vulnerability of Cupid Deluxe, it sounds rogueish and distant. Mockasin doesn't necessarily shy from heartfelt expressions, but he often cloaks them behind a smirk.

So the two make good foils, and Myths 001 is never more amusing than when it plays Hynes' sincerity against Mockasin's oddball falsetto. The duo recorded the EP in Texas over about a week during the Marfa Myths festival this spring with little planning, but all that feels rushed is its 11-minute runtime. The production is nearly as luscious as Cupid Deluxe, all soft-rock decadence and red-light ambiance, and two of its three tracks, while not quite knockouts, are distinctively peculiar. "La Fat Fur" opens the EP with a gust of trembling post-punk, imagining what Wire might have sounded like if they'd gone through a Prince phase in the '80s. "Feelin' Lovely" similarly has some fun scribbling across genre boundaries, piling bluesy riffs and jazz-fusion keyboards and saxophones over an unusually funky quiet storm groove, playing like a funhouse homage to Marvin Gaye's Midnight Love.

The slow-burn closer "Big Distant Crush" could use a little bit of that eccentricity. It's the EP's most earnest number, but also its most meandering, five minutes of aimless heartache that can't help but feel like an attempt to pad an otherwise skimpy EP. There's enough here to demonstrate that Hynes and Mockasin have some chemistry, but not enough to fully show it off. This is probably to be expected from an EP whipped up from scratch in just a week, but whichever artists end up on Myths 002 might do well to consider reserving a few extra days in the studio in case they hit it off.