Kidcrash - Jokes

Kidcrash - Turtleelephant

From start to finish, a brilliantly technical and involving album. Every instrument played here is working with eachother to create a monster of a song. Youtube informs me that you can download the album for free at http://bit.ly/i5tXb5

I'm in the middle of a phase that has seen me getting into a bunch of post-hardcore / skramz bands and I've gotta say I'm enjoying it. Highly reccommended in the genre lies Kidcrash's album, Jokes, which offers many solid tracks of highly technical post-hardcore jams, tonally similar to other bands in the field while being far more advanced in a subtle way.

The album manages to guard the talent of every instrumentalist by using an odd guitar tone, cleaner than your standard rock, metal or hardcore band. Other bands with similar song structure such as Gospel or Between The Buried And Me have worked with a highly produced, heavy toned chaos that while impressive, has a certain 'showoff' air to it which I always found quite jarring. Kidcrash's clean guitar and more modest structuring still has that 'showoff' vibe without going over the top with it, resulting in what I feel is a much more listenable album than works from the previously mentioned artists.

Back to the instrumentals, each instrument is carefully attuned to the rest of the song. Both guitars seem to dance through eachother's riff work, creating airy progressions and crushing jams. The bass doesn't simply follow the rest of the music but rather creates it's own tone behind the song, while the drums are constantly changing the pace of the song to the point where the same riff could have been played three, four times but it would have sounded completely different due to the drums snapping off in these brilliant flowing rock style jams. The vocals are kept to an absolute minimum and are barely emphasised in comparisson to the rest of the music, cutting in like an extra instrument used minimalistically in the same way that some samples or synths are used structurally in other songs.

As a guy who loves his instruments, I can really see the value of an album like this. I'm sorry to lay this one down with pseudo technical bullshit, but this is one of the best constructed albums that I've listened to without having to deal with the wankerish tone that you could expect from music so well constructed (I'm looking at you BTBAM with your goddamn clean vocals, hour long chained song album and stupid jazzy well produced jams smacked together in one of the most frustrating strucutral clusterfucks I've ever heard/liked).

So yeah, give these guys a listen if you want a mix between Gospel/BTBAM and Fall of Troy/Crash of Rhinos. Really fantastic shit. Kind of trails off at the end of the album on the first few listens, but I'm finding an appreciation for every song and I'd easily give the album a 4.9 out of 5.