Reviews
Kinksi
Down Below It's Chaos
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Add to del.ico.us.Review Date: 2007-10-16
Man! The first track on this one, ‘Crybaby Blowout’ was a pretty good shot of raw rock, the stuff that’s almost as fuzzy as a teenage boy’s top lip. The riffs hit you like if J Mascis had his way with Queens of the Stone Age. It brought back a lot of memories of the old stoner-rock band Fu Manchu. I almost started fist pumping.
Then the song ended.
‘Passwords and Alcohol’ gives a completely different feeling. The guitars are still dirty as hell but they sludge through the song which is considerably slower than the opening track. This dynamic between the two songs so early on made me think to reconsider my original assessments of the album because this track seems to set the tone for the album.
Oh, and the random appearance of singing seemed really off.
‘Boy, I was mad’ kicks off after two minutes of near-serene (compared to the heavier tracks on here) guitars, one the ‘clean’ setting probably for the first time since the band acquired them. It almost has a real Sonic Youth feel to it (probably Dirty or Daydream Nation era) if you can forget that Josh Homme exists.
‘Child had to catch a train’, track 6, is very repetitive and is easy to fall into a ‘broken record’ feeling and track 7, ‘Plan Steal drive’ starts to hit off as a good rocking start but eventually works its way into the kind of thing you would expect to hear onstage when a band is getting ready for sound check.
Finally, eight songs in, ‘Punching goodbye out front’ starts back up on the same vibe that I’ve been expecting since the first song. The lyrics still seem out of place since half of the album is instrumental, but it doesn’t necessarily take anything away from the rest of the music going on.
Though it was a decent album and there’s nothing about it that I outright hate, this album isn’t much of my catch. It’s worth multiple listens, but I don’t see myself going out of my mind with wanting to hear it. I think it would be more appreciated in the hands of my Dave Grohl-worshipping, bong-collecting buddy.
Score: 5.5
- Michael Bulko