Kinesis - 'Handshakes For Bullets' (Independiente)
5/5
By: Matt Tomiak
It's tempting to describe the emergence over the past year-and-a-bit of Kinesis as 'refreshing'.
But refreshing hardly does them justice. In an age where even supposedly 'punk' bands seem uniformly devoid of any kind of political manifesto whatsoever, these four wide-eyed, assured kids from Greater Manchester have grabbed British rock by the scruff of its neck and given its complacent arse one of the darndest good kickings its ever had.
A furious, thrilling, vital debut album, 'Handshakes for Bullets' is a record of hurricane-force guitars and righteously intense political sloganeering. The band may barely be into their twenties, but when was that ever a problem? Kinesis want to change things. They haven't grown resigned to apathy just yet (although they have written a scathing track, 'Conveyer Belt Destruction', about people who have); lest we forget, a young Bob Dylan once remarked that he might only have been 21 years old, but he already knew there'd been too many wars.
Bob's music has always been fairly oblique, though. Kinesis, however, tackle issues head-on. The confrontational, venomous '... And They Obey' - the best thing on this record - deals with NAFTA, Nazi Germany and capitalism. And in the paranoid post-9/11 age where the alleged 'Patriot Act' passed by George W. Bush can result in suspected 'terrorists' being detained and stripped of virtually all civil rights, frontman Michael Bromley's avowal that 'Germany wasn't that far away' becomes all the more chilling.
Yes, Michael Moore should be sent a copy of 'Handshakes for Bullets'; he'd surely love all of what these boys have to say, but perhaps would particularly approve of the acerbic 'Average American Corpse', Kinesis' answer to 'Stupid White Men'... Yep, Mike would be proud. So should Kinesis.
Artists in this article: Kinesis
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