Kinski

Down Below It's Chaos

(Sub Pop)

Record Review by Marcel Feldmar

I love me some Kinski, yes I do. The albums are fantastic, the live shows kill, and this latest Kinskian offering from Sub Pop does both. It kills fantastically. This here is the third full length sub pop recording, and it, to me, seems to be taking what hit before and standing on its outstretched sonic arms. Chris Martin and his Velvet Underground on cocaine guitar riffs, hitting certain Sonic Youthanisms like a car crash, pushes the band ever forwards, relying only on the Bass playing steady heaviness of Lucy Atkinson to keep him on the right planet and the steady brick wall velvet drum crunch courtesy of Barrett Wilke to keep him from possibly moving through time.

With this rhythm section, Chris is free to let his notes tangle and mesh and mess and match with the notes that fly and swirl from Matthew Reid-Schwartz’s guitar. Then there are the slow and heavy and bright light filled moments of distorted perfection, tribal youth creating drones for spacemen to get off on, and sometimes Chris sings along. There is a definite hint of Thurston Moore inspiration in the words, but not glaringly, more like – appreciatively. This is music to take drugs to, this is music to sit and space out with, this is music that also can shake you up until you realize that yeah, you are alive – and it feels amazing. There’s a stoner drone heaviness to some of the songs here – but never falling too far under gravity’s punch. Possibly because when you get the Kinski’s together with producer / recording engineer Randall Dunn – who worked with bands like Earth, Sunn O))), and Boris, you are able to alter the physics of sound and gravity in ways that were not previously possible.

And still… the guitars kill me in the best way possible.