AND THE KIDS
Growing up, often the safest haven to plot your dreams and get a handle on your identity is within the confines of trusted friendships. For the musicians in the critically acclaimed band And The Kids, these bonds have been a life raft.
But as friendships evolve from adolescence to young adulthood, sometimes the lines between friends, lovers and all that comes in between can grow murky. On the Northampton, MA-based band’s latest, Friends Share Lovers (out June 3rd on Signature Sounds), And the Kids examines blurred boundaries in close-knit relationships.
“The friends we grew up with were troublemakers, lost souls, dropouts, and mother figures,” says And The Kidsguitarist and vocalist Hannah Mohan. “The title references the incestuousness of friend groups and how things get messy.”
And The Kids channel existential crises into pop euphoria. With this sleight of hand, the quartet manages to conjure chunky indie rock, blissful new wave, chamber folk, jarring avant-garde, and brawny classic rock. Mohan navigates this expansive creativity with aplomb. Effortlessly she swoops heavenly for high tones, digs deep for swaggering rock n’ roll low tones, and manages to mash up sweet sass with new wave bliss for a vocal feel that masks sage wisdom beneath sweet innocence. In addition to Mohan, And The Kids is Rebecca Lasaponaro on drums, Megan Miller on synthesizers and percussion, and bassist Taliana Katz.
Friends Share Lovers bursts forth with the pent-up emotionality of the opening track, aptly titled “Kick Rocks.” Here drum climaxes interlock with hypnotic harmony vocals, building a tension that crashes like a wave cresting, leaving in its wake glassy flowing melodies. The thematic thread of relationships imbues the new wave elegance of “Friends Share Lovers” and “I Can’t Tell What The Time Is Telling Me.” The title track evokes a Smiths-like juxtaposition of balmy musicality set against poetic turmoil as Mohan wrestles with the complexities of a friendship sliding into a romance. The stunning “I Can't Tell What The Time Is Telling Me” envelops the listener with chiming guitars, oceanic synth textures, and sidesteps into classical melodic motifs. “That track is about getting through tough times with a new partner. It’s about being true to yourself after you’ve fallen in love,” Mohan explains.
Friends Share Lovers is that pivotal release, the follow up to a well-received album from a promising young band. The new album showcases And The Kids’ considerable powers manifesting into a triumphant record that justifies the earlier praise. However, for the members of And The Kids, the impact that matters the most to them is the bonds they make with their audience. To that end, Mohan says: “What’s been most meaningful is realizing what a big influence a small band can have. We see women at the shows who say they want to play music and that we inspired them to do what they love.”
PALM
While Palm, a four-piece from upstate New York, have made their home in the same Hudson scene as experimental art rockers Buke and Gase, Palm’s story started when guitarists/vocalists Kasra Kurt and Eve Alpert developed a musical kinship while attending the same high school. The pair decided to continue their education at Bard College and quickly founded Palm with drummer Hugo Stanley. Their earliest material was entirely instrumental and concentrated on the interplay between Kasra and Eve's thick, mechanical guitar parts against Hugo's sparse, loose drum phrases. Not long after that, the band added Gerasimos Livitsanos on bass and has refined its sound over the past few years with a focus on detail, density, and heaviness. With a palette informed by punk, metal, and noise as well as jazz and bossa nova, they utilize traditional rock instruments to create playful experiments that, using unpredictable time signatures, move up and down, back and forth, and all over the map.
'Trading Basics', the band’s full-length debut, released on Exploding In Sound and Inflated Records, challenges the listener's expectations with moments of dissonance that are reigned in and precise. The pretty moments are often where the chaos is. Amid these constant and rapid changes, the band sneaks in an unrelenting, trance-inducing repetition. Recorded and mixed by Eli Crews (Deerhoof, tUnE-yArDs) at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn, the album is a confident statement that this young band has carefully crafted a unique sonic vocabulary and methodology during their short time together. Being somewhat removed from city life, and having access to a 24 hour practice space in Hudson, has resulted in an unparalleled level of discipline and focus on their craft. In addition to the new record, the band’s impending relocation to Philadelphia, and September tour with Warehouse, expect Palm to take their incredibly tight live show on the road in support of 'Trading Basics' in the year to come.
