  Kinski
Space Launch For Frenchie (CD)
Self-released
CD Review by Andrew Hamlin
The desert,
desert romantics notwithstanding, probably
doesn't thrum or hum. It might; I've grown up
pretty far away from anything you could call
desert, unless you count the eastern portion of
my native state, which I call "catbox"
and my Montana-dwelling friends call the godawful
boring need-the-boombox-on-loud portion of
the Seattle-Missoula run. George Gastin, pilgrim
of Jim Dodge's second novel Not Fade Away,
hears and melds with and runs from a great many
things in the American sands, but part of that's
the American plains, and he's on a lot of
drugs. Read the book anyway. It presents
possibilities.
But even if the
desert doesn't thrum or hum, it somehow soothes
our romantic innards to pretend they do. A little
collective deception is, hopefully, no fatal
affair; those candy Valentine hearts shaped like
actual hearts are so funny, if gross, because of
how most of us reflexively think they're the
wrong shape, before reason overrides. Another
question being begged: If the desert doesn't
thrum or hum, then shouldn't it? Our romantic
innards, exact contours unknown, seem to insist
on it.
The trio Kinski, then, are what we like
to hear in a desert, preferably one several hours
after sunset but still warm, host to an onimous
waxing moon and a subtle sifting, ground-up rock
rearranging itself to suit who knows what. Simple
patterns on guitar, bass, drums (and sometimes
keys or violin, courtesy bassist Lucy Atkinson)
throb, swell, and crescendo without much thought
of breaking on through; the sound of Kinski is the sound of
something coming—maybe a flying saucer four
feet off the ground, like the ones in the old
Battlezone video game—but not, in any case,
the sound of something recognizable arriving. At
the height of an impassioned insectival drone,
the power trio instruments imploding towards a
common core, this might bring to mind Sonic Youth reunited
with their old gear, but Kinski sees no need to lurch
back into what we might recognize as rock, nor
for heavy-handed New Yawk pop culture stickiness.
When guitarist Chris Martin deigns to sing, he's
deadpan and off-handed, engagingly blank. His
missives sound straight out of the the Mojave Phone
Booth; the important point is not his
message, but that it's coming from where it's
coming from. Dig this desert heat and be ye
refreshed. Without the drugs, even.
Email Andrew Hamlin
Also in Pandemonium
Online:
Kinski Live
Photos
One Night of
Promise and Delivery
Reef Valmont reviews Voyager One
with Lolly and Kinski
live at the Showbox
Billy Bragg's Reaching
To The Converted
The improbable beauty of Billy Bragg's
falsetto calls you to the Mojave phone booth, in
this CD Review by Andrew
Hamlin
Nine Inch Nails' The
Fragile
The
new disc from Trent Reznor is "a glorious,
magnificent, life-affirming, soul-scorching,
wings-giving, head-cleaning statement of art and
ambition," says Reef Valmont in this
in-depth CD Review
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Peter Parker's Migliore!
Everything you've heard is true, says Dave
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Real Rage
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"Seeing Al Jourgensen scream 'Die'
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and L7 live at the Paramount Theater
Superchunk's
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"Come Pick Me Up is the
album where Smokey Robinson meets Richard
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IN BOB WE TRUST
Mark
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Off the Deep End
With Marine Research
Sounds From
the Gulf Stream is
"a fine, heartwarming disc, easily capable--
like the oceanic phenomena in the title-- of
raising temperatures all the way from the
sun-dappled palms of Florida to the icy fjords of
Norway," says Dave Liljengren
in this CD Review
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