Kid:Coda - Kid:Coda (Kitchenware)
3/5
By: Charlie Potter
When a band insist on using a great deal of instruments like this band has, there's always a fine line between creating an absorbing layered harmony of melodies and just losing focus. Unfortunately for Kid:Coda, they fall the wrong side of this line too often not to notice, particularly during the first few tracks - a shame, because it's a difficult thing to avoid, and what the band are trying to do overall is very commendable. Almost everything else is in place, and at times they pull it off; in 'Keep the Belief' for example there's a very definite chord progression which makes it a lot easier for all the other instruments and sounds play off, rather than trying the very difficult procedure of having all the instruments play off of each other.
The next few tracks keep up this more coherent structure in which the elements become much more recognisable, some of them being tried and tested (and perhaps a little stale) but occasionally they seem to have taken some genuine, studied influence from electronica or IDM outfits that are otherwise a massive resource of ideas and sounds often being sorely overlooked, and have through no fault of their own started to become an entity unto themselves. Not only do they look at these blueprints, they seem to somehow make them into pop melodies. But don't get to excited too quickly, for these are merely glimmers in the corners of the music, and there still remains that lingering feeling of that neo-Hacienda scene that seems to be on the up in the north of England. Don't get me wrong, the idea is fine, and I'm not condemning music for coming from the north (wouldn't dream of it, we'd get lamped), it's just some of these bands have sacrificed being good (or at least innovative) to sound like part of the scene, or the bands that the scene is influenced by.
It would be grossly unfair to just peg this band to these 2 genres, and although they're the two that are most prominent, they have a lot else up their sleeves, and are clearly fans of all sorts of music new and old. The more they draw on that, the better they'll get.
Artists in this article: Kid:Coda
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