This E.P. is not online. I can't find album art, yet. Actually, it barely exists, officially, yet and there's nothing I have to stream for you.
Tonight - 9pm - PJs Lager House - The Kickstand Band's "Summer EP" release / Walking Beat / Junk Food Junkies / James Linck
The Kickstand Band banged it out in a week, mixed it, and are now packaging it for it's FREE release, tonight, at the Lager House. Which means that by the time the next print issue comes out, it'll be old news and you'll have already heard it and made your minds up about it. Oh, such a sign o' the post-everything pop-music times.
So if you go to the show tonight, you get the E.P. for free and can then twist the night away to the local trio's inherently summery jams.
Looking back 2-3 years, to when guitarist/singer Gordon Smith was playing with the Sights, one of his contributions to Most of What Follows Is True was a song about a summer romance. So the best I could do, in the weening hours before you hear this E.P. is propose a theory that he and bassist/singer Allison Young have a preoccupation with this season's intoxicating magic.
It's that certain electricity in the air that charges up above the humming AC units and chirping crickets and demands to be utilized: stay up late, take road trips, find the beach, dance out on your lawn, sleep on your lawn... That nostalgic, mostly-good-natured impulse to live it up is inherent to the tried-and-true traditions of 2 ½ minute pop songs. Get in, twist it up, trampoline your way off two or three choruses and sommersault your way through a solo while you aeroplane your arms out to running rhythms and coaxing melodies...and ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
The Kickstand Band are incurably infected with summertime and it's symptoms seem to be an endless roadtrip following the sun, to keep it warm, bright, and above all, fun. You can hear the songs yourself. The thing just JUST came out...
"Promenade," I'll say, is a freshly shredded reinterpretation of where pop can mediate buzzy surf and crusty-indie-rock. "August" defies the idea that the band can be simplified to just being a power-pop trio. And they do an interesting cover of "Sealed with a Kiss."
There. That's all I'll say.
http://www.thekickstandband.com/
