Kingsbury: THE GREAT COMPROMISE by Evan Greenwald
January 15, 2008
There is little room for Kingsbury to be happy, apparently. They’re melancholy of sometimes the best quality, like the Smashing-Pumpkins-meets-a-sad-version-of-the-Violent-Femmes of their album’s opener, “Corpse,” with the heavy church bells and the distorted humming guitar, the climactic gloom of “Buried Beneath the Trees,” or the heavy, sped-up march of “Blood In the Kitchen.” And sometimes it’s just really, really bizarre, like in “Desert Inn”.
But you have to give Kingsbury credit. Most bands who try out the dreary vocal style drown faster than their lyrics say they want to be. But here the dreariness is all apart of a bigger picture. It’s not whiny enough to be emo and it’s not hardcore enough to be goth, it’s just generally dark, and it sounds pretty good that way.
Now, Dreary doesn’t mean quiet, like it is usually assumed to mean, and “Peninsula” helps back me up. It’s loud and dark at the same time.
See, the fun of Kingsbury is that it’s seriously dark. Not dark to be funny or dark because the band thinks it’ll make them more popular, but because it’s how they are. And sometimes being yourself means being depressing. Doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to enjoy the sound of suffering, does it?
Key Tracks: Corpse, Blood In the Kitchen, Peninsula
