AWmusic

Throw on your flannel shirt and grab a mouthful of marbles because it’s 1992 all the fuck over again.

kc quilty hail from Brooklyn, New York, which has probably given us enough cheesy-ass post-Strokes guitar pop in the last ten minutes to burst a blood vessel; Sadie Dupuis and co. buck this trend and take us back to a time that seems so much simpler and yet so much more complicated. I often listen to alt-rock records from the 90′s and reflect wistfully on how no one produces like that anymore, with the monolithic guitars charging out of both speakers right into your fucking face, like a huge pane of glass attempting to pin you to the wall. The production is really what makes this record, mostly unadorned, the drums crunchy and overdriven, the guitars a dense sludge of indie-post-indie-rawk, yet still floating widely around Sadie’s sardonic vocals. Yeah, the singer’s a girl, and she has a sweet voice, but don’t call her twee. She sings like she’d be sticking her tongue out if she could, and if you tried to make eyes at her while she’s on stage, she’d probably roll them deliberately at you, and considering the gloriously pulverizing noise she can wring out of her instrument (punctuated by quieter moments of breathless tension) while rhyming “supernova” with “nice to know ya,” you want to avoid fucking with her like you would Jerry Cantrell.

In spite of the confrontational posturing, though, this music is pop perfection – the classic Pixies loud-soft dynamics given new melodic life by the band’s Britpop inflections; matter of fact, “Mr. Benjamin Watson” is probably the best song Blur never got to write for their self-titled album, and probably half of these songs could sound like Leisure with balls if it wasn’t all so gloriously punk rock. It’s hard to avoid trying to play “spot the influence” with indie music these days, but kc quilty do what the best pop music does, drawing together disparate influences into a seamless and infectious whole. Need proof? Put on “Jackshit,” crank the volume, and try to resist letting your hair down and air-drumming to Julian Fader’s slapbacked virtuosity.

kc quilty’s debut album, Clover/Coriander, is to be available soon via NYC micro-indie Cooling Pie Records, home to the recently Village Voice’d (and polarizing) Ava Luna.

kc quilty – Jackshit
kc quilty – Mr. Benjamin Watson

kc quilty Official Site
kc quilty MySpace
Cooling Pie Records