Put six guys in a room with a variety of instruments, hit record, and let an album happen.
Nick McGarvey | rawr reviews
Refreshing idea alert: put six guys in a room with a variety of instruments, hit record, and let an album happen. If this isn’t exactly what happened with “Kinder Machines,” it is certainly the vibe that was captured, and in an age of ever-expanding digitization of the processes involved in making a record, you’ve got a real gem on your hands when you recreate that feeling.
Aside from the loose, open style of the songs (not to be interpreted as sloppy), there’s just a simple, pleasurable flavor all about, be it in an album-wide sense, a song-wide sense, or a note-by-note sense. One could imagine this as a great “afternoon in the sun, barbecuing with friends” soundtrack, and yet the record would hold up to an intensive listening experience, down to the most intricate details. Easy to enjoy, yet full of interest for a discerning or critical set of ears.
Sometimes a piece of work, be it music, art, architecture or any creative outlet really, will be seen for its incredible focus on a certain scale. Some things have a huge, overarching concept, to which the small parts are very subservient.
Some are oriented on details, on the minutia, rewarding those who dare to venture in close and pay attention.
Every now and then, we come across a work that manages scalability to its appeal, and a very rare thing that is. Beaten By Them have managed that feat rather nicely here. Essentially cohesive, with but a few parts that seem perhaps misplaced, or just unnecessary, this is truly an album.
It transcends the “collection of songs” problem that afflicts many records. At the same time, each song attains its own voice, beats its own rhythmic pulse, and displays unique instrumentation.
Human touch has been allowed in to the music. The wavering of a few notes hasn’t been spruced to perfection in a recording software program. The music picks up a little speed when it needs to, or sits behind the beat when appropriate.
Drum beats act as a dance floor for piano and keyboards, those sneaky percussive elements that everyone thinks of as stringed instruments, until rhythmic interplays such as these remind us that they are melodic drums worthy of a great drummer.
In all honesty, “Kinder Machines” was mailed to KUOI and found its way on to a shelf, where it sat in need of a willing reviewer. Some nice packaging went a long way with convincing me to be the guinea pig. Thankfully, that worked out well, as my collection of good stuff has now grown by one album. Things don’t often work out like that when an average of ten albums a day gets mailed right to your office. Frequently, it can be a disheartening proposition to sit through nine bad records to find that one good one, but it seems we all got lucky today with Beaten By Them.