Kittens Ablaze
I’ve just done a slot on indie disco for DC’s radio show The Waiting Room, going out tonight from 10pm to midnight UK time on Error FM, and to be honest, I was stumped. What the fuck is indie disco anyway? If it’s what indie kids listen to in discos then it’s basically just the more upbeat indie stuff, surely? And if it’s indie mixed with disco, then, erm, well I’m not sure I’m the right man to be asking.
Kittens Ablaze get close at times. Strobelight could hold its own with the best of them on dance floors full of polite, shuffling young men in battered trainers and colourful t-shirts. For the most part, however, this EP is pretty much straight down the line indie rock. The recordings sound pretty thin and distant, but it’s hard to tell if that’s an aesthetic choice or simply a result of it being a demo. Raw might be a better way of describing it.
Whatever the reason, it works really well with the music if you ask me, so I hope that the engineer on the album they’re recording at the moment doesn’t try and make them try and sound Big all of a sudden. They’re versatile too. The aforementioned Strobelight could easily have issued from Toad favourites The 63 Crayons. Later stuff however gets into sort of scratchy, atonal indie territory, and at other times Jenny Bress and Michelle Young’s strings raise the mood to a deliciously tense pitch similar to that heard in some of the UK’s alternative folk scene at the moment.
Funnily enough Government Romance, the opener, is my least favourite. The pace never quite picks up, and as a result the song never quite ignites. For the rest of it, though, there’s no such danger. It’s full of ideas, bristling with confidence, and for all I don’t love every last moment perhaps, it’s the sort of really promising demo that should have any record exec pricking up his ears. Were they not mostly idiots, of course.
Kittens Ablaze – Strobelight
Kittens Ablaze – Evangeline
