This album should come with a warning label, alerting the listener to just how arresting, how addictive its beats are. Some of the songs are terrifyingly good, and at its best, the album paints a swirling, hypnotic, and mesmerizing soundscape. The songs skip from one style to another—sometimes mid-track. Even at the most basic level it’s impossible to predict what the album will serve up next. Head Like a Kite are DJing their own album, and it has no qualms about swerving in and out of songs, mixing things up, just to turn the beat up a notch.
Lead singer and maestro Dave Einmo has said that if he had to describe the album with one word, it’d be “festive.” That’s entirely too lame of a characterization, making the album sound as if it’d be suitable for background music at an office Christmas party. He should have chosen a different word: dangerous. Even if the album falters a bit after a dazzling opening set, Head Like a Kite has put together an exceptional piece of work. This is a group with a bright future.
The album begins deceptively, with a mini trumpet fanfare that segues into a lilting female voice asking—or begging—to “start it all again.” The repetition of the phrase is hypnotic, threatening to put us into a trance and lulling us into a false sense of complacency. Then the next track bolts us back into the reality of the “suspended night,” beginning with a noise that sounds like an alarm buzz on a spaceship. What happens next is pure fun, with the song’s worry that “she’s wearing that costume that’s causing all those problems.” The video to the song—worth a look—is simply of an attractive girl turning all sorts of heads (including a panda bear, and two men dressed in Superman suits). Thus begins the string of songs on this album with hooks that you’ll be taking to your grave, or at least into next week. This is nearly LCD Soundsystem good.
The third track begins modestly with the announcer saying, “here’s another song.” But what a song! This is certainly the high point of the album, where all of the group’s eclectic styles come together as pure pop perfection. The rap-narration concerns a man disoriented and lost in a dream-world of parties and missed connections, before melding seamlessly into the scarily beautiful chorus that he is “always on the wrong side of sunrise.” You’ll have a hard time forgetting it.
After such a triumphant start, the album sets itself up with a hell of a hard act to follow. And the rest of the songs fail to maintain the high quality of the opening trio. The bizarrely named “Robot Makes Love with the Swingset, 1976,” probably refers to something, but I’d be hard pressed to say what. In any case, it’s easily the laziest song on the album, giving us an Isaac Hayes-like guitar lick over some weak synth sounds. “Director’s Cut” returns us to the vibe that worked so well in “Wrong Side of Sunrise,” with even more sophisticated lyrics: thoughts of movies and life and acting the part. “We Hang Our Hearts from the Willow” has an infectious guitar lick that carries the song through some rather strange rhetorical turns. “Thrones of Glory” shows that the group can put together a pretty decent pop anthem.
Head Like a Kite should be scared of how good they can become, given what they’ve shown us here. If the album doesn’t convincingly sustain its brilliance from beginning to end, it comes awfully close. The band prove themselves good at so many things, we can only look forward to their next effort, with both anticipation and fear.
Track List:
1. Let's Start It All Again
2. She's Wearing that Costume
3. We're Always on the Wrong Side of Sunrise
4. The Perfect Drinker
5. Robot Makes Love with the Swingset, 1976
6. Director's Cut
7. My Very First Ransom Note
8. The Boy Who Lost His Courage
9. We Hang Our Hearts from the Willows
10. Thrones of Glory
11. Naïve Little Symphony
12. Beat Zero
