Big Hug

Big Hug is the sixth Scoobert record, after Little Hug.

Finding $D is the lab notebook. Swami’s is the collage LP. Dragon Ball $d is the narrative hip-hopera. Masks and Monsters is the pandemic record. Little Hug is the small recovery object. Big Hug is the post-pandemic LP: anxious little apes, but the groove still works, the jokes still help, and life is better when somebody gives you a big hug.

Bandcamp Big Hug (LP) dropped October 8, 2021 ($8 or more, 24-bit/88.2kHz). Sixteen songs, about forty-four minutes, on Spotify, Apple Music, and a YouTube visualizer, ℗ 2021 Beformer. The earlier records mostly have visual albums (long music videos); Big Hug has a visualizer instead. Luke Francis Walton wrote, arranged, recorded, mixed, and produced most of it holistically; J MESA (Babidi / Taylor James) co-wrote I See the Moment (Bandcamp: I See the Monument) and Hold Up; Malik LovesYall co-wrote All in the Feeling and appears on Kick It in Nirvana. Pro Tools almost like the main instrument. Most songs came together in a few intense days, same fast-DIY lineage as Finding $D, but with a much better toolkit. Mundane Magazine quotes him on the shift: the mixing no longer “sucks,” the music more approachable, bass central.

San Diego Reader and Mundane both describe it as the follow-up to Little Hug, aimed at people emerging from caves full of fear and social awkwardness. Can’t Imagine Feeling Better, If I Could Only, and Debby (Extended) (same song as the EP: adds a guitar solo) carry material forward from the EP. Track 13 is I See the Monument on Bandcamp; some distributor metadata (DistroKid, MusicBrainz) lists the same song as “I See the Moment.” This site follows Bandcamp. I’m an Idiot, Don’t Worry, Scared to Reunite, Where Did Our Love Go, All in the Feeling, and the title track all point at the same post-pandemic problem: how to be a person again without pretending you aren’t scared, dumb, lonely, self-conscious, or weird. Heffalumps, Napster jokes, California mythology: still cartoon shell.

I’m an Idiot landed on Spotify’s New Music Friday around release; UNXIGNED caught the single in September 2021. Munich’s egoFM named Big Hug Album der Woche for release week (October 8, 2021). Glasse Factory later notes a San Diego Music Awards nomination for Best R&B, Funk or Soul Album. What comes next is KŌAN: paradox, Japan, and spatial sound.