Wierd Records – VR019
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Kites - (2004) Royal Paint With The Metallic Gardener From The United States Of America Helped Into An Open Field By Women And Children LP
Load has never been a label to pull punches, but Kites (a guy allegedly named Christopher Forbes) kicks out the sonic collage assault far harsher than most of the semi-standard prog/skronk/thrash we’ve come to expect from Providence’s finest. And, as anyone even remotely familiar with the Brainbombs, Mindflayer, or Pink and Brown would readily agree, that’s saying something.
First off, a disclaimer: “noise” is perhaps the most insanely whored-out word in the daily lexicon of left-of-center music journalism. As an adjective, it’s been bandied about so wantonly – to describe everyone from My Bloody Valentine to Merzbow to Pink Floyd (!) – that it’s now a totally vague and meaningless adjective. Nevertheless, Royal Paint with the Metallic Gardener from the United States of America Helped into an Open Field by Women and Children is nothing if not non-stop noise.
Well, actually, there’s some stops, but only in a stuttered, channel-surfing sort of way, like cutting from a nine-minute, squealing, mechanized drill attack track to a simple, 60-second sing-song poem where the only instrumentation is handclaps and lap slaps. The juxtapositions are jarring and uncomfortable, rendering the record’s rare lulls in loudness – brief acoustic meanderings, or sporadic spells of silence – as just menacing calms before impending violent electrical storms. Musically speaking, Royal Paint is not kite-flying weather.
The opener, “Staring at the Sun,” sets the tone: caustic, spastic, and spontaneous. Forbes is most frequently identified as an “electrical system operator,” which is fitting because Kites’ sonic terrain is a wasteland of fried wires, crazy looping bleeps, and piercing oscillators. Occasionally, like on “Suppress Control Reduce Destroy,” the circuit-board-gone-haywire sound buzzes so brutally it borders on electro-industrial, with frantic, distorted screams writhing in the mayhem.
More often than not though, Royal Paint pursues the path of knob-twiddling ear-gougers like Masonna and early Hanatarash, modulating malfunctioning white noise processors into jittery squiggles of screeching chaos. Of course, it’s important to remember that this is American music, so naturally Kites is a lot more choppy and restless in his approach to textures and exploration than the focused, ritualistic intensity so distinct to most solitary Japanese noise gurus. It’s less Zen, more ADD (and land of the free).
Further, like a lot of extreme noise stuff, Royal Paint seems best suited for a live setting (preferably someplace crowded and dark), and side B’s wild medley of 2003 performances, “Call Out Your Real Name,” confirms this notion. The shrieking isn’t thrust so crisply into the foreground, and the lo-fi recording conditions mute the overall sprawl into something stranger, rawer, and almost musical, more in the vein of broken electronics bands like Hair Police and Universal Indians, who at least toy with rhythm and structure before destroying them. - OR -
The opening track, of course, primes you for the kind of noise assault you’re likely to be in for here. Even before that, you know that it is indeed gonna be a “noise assault.” Everything, from the whimsical sloppiness of the artwork, to the fact that it’s on the Providence, RI scum-noise-rock label Load, prepares you for ugliness and grit, and it’s only a matter of what kind of grit you’re in for. And the opening track, “Staring Into the Sun,” despite a name uncomfortably similar to a lightweight 90s U2 cut, is a very familiar brand of noisy distorted guitar heroics, light on the guitar and heavy on the distortion. High-pitched whines, playful little squiggles of dog-whistle frequencies, and sustained fire alarm bleeps: that’s the palette in effect here, and the relationship to guitar (if that is indeed what’s being mangled here) is distant. The idea of settling in for an entire album of this, absent the sheer energy of Lightning Bolt or the greater sense of dynamics and emotion possessed by other noiseheads inclined in this direction, is frankly rather unappetizing. But thankfully or unthankfully, Kites don’t seem any more interested in pursuing one sound over the course of their debut than most people would be in listening to any of these experiments stretched out to album-length.
Though “Staring,” at almost 10 minutes, is among a handful of longer cuts here, the majority of the disc’s 10 tracks are fairly short bursts that portray tiny fragmented corners of the band’s multi-headed sound. “Changlings” is a sparse sing-a-long with handclapped beats and chanted vocals narrating a grisly poem, and “Cry For the Death of a Crazy Man” similarly demonstrates their more accessible, song-oriented side with a folky, upbeat guitar instrumental. On “Suppress Control Reduce Destroy,” the group indulges in a minute of Merzbow-level howling noise with metal-inspired screams ringing out amid the chaos, while “Local Boy” stretches out the same kind of Wolf Eyes-esque wankery to an epic two minutes. Token Indian and exotic influences arise on the sloppy gamelan approximation of “Bike Ride pt. III” (which is hypnotically repetitive, but at barely a minute-and-a-half, not given nearly enough time to develop its potential power) and on the album closing “(shut off the lie, we’ll die) (we will transform).”
These short tracks are variously successful in their respective attempts at different “genres” of noise, but none of them have much depth or impact beyond the momentary. Only a pair of lengthier tracks toward the end of the album has a deeper substance, carrying the band a few steps beyond their superficial stabs at making the ugliest, messiest noises possible. “Call Out Your Real Name,” a medley of performances from five live appearances recorded in 2003, works because, rather than being a series of short pieces like the rest of Royal Paint..., shorter moments from concerts have been spliced together into a coherent whole that develops near-seamlessly over its nine minutes of destruction. There’s still nothing particularly ground-breaking here, but the group’s caterwauling vocals, splintered instruments and layers of droning noise have an energy and physicality that’s lacking elsewhere on the record. Occasional snippets of crowd noise, added to the visceral sensation of heavy objects being moved and things being violently broken, give the piece a texture and presence that just for a moment puts them on a near-equal level with their obvious antecedent-contemporaries in Wolf Eyes. The brief applause that closes the track is well-deserved.
This cut is immediately followed by the even longer “Milkweed Arrows,” which returns to the ground laid by the opening cut, albeit more successfully and less single-mindedly. There’s often a lot to be said for this kind of ear-clenching sonic debris, but when, as in this case, it doesn’t seem to be in the service of anything greater than pissing off listeners, it’s rightfully hard to appreciate or enjoy. On the evidence of this album, Kites seems to be a powerful live band with an experimental bent, but they’re certainly still too young and new to be settling comfortably into their own sound. Royal Paint... finds them rooting around happily in search of their own little niche within the noise-rock garden, never finding it but throwing up mounds of dirt in the process.
Load Records – Load 053
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