On their second full-length release, New York City’s Kite Operations takes the post-rock risings and fallings to a whole other level. Heart Attacks, Back to Back… consists of slow, subdued parts you can barely hear, and then breaks down into huge crescendos of sound.
Generally, the quiet parts are nice, but meander and lack substance, while the crescendos are excellent, but too few and far between.
For an album that contains such variations with its songs, there isn’t nearly as much, song-to-song. “I Want to See” sets the tone, as it opens up the record with almost a minute of near-silence, then a meanders, with a stripped-down take and lots of “oohs”, until halfway through, where it blows up into a powerful, atmospheric explosion. But that only lasts a few minutes, and then more post-rock minimalist dawdling. It’s a template that virtually every other song follows, with the better ones, like “The Last Flight Out Left With No Warning” or “Good Morning”, just featuring more sonic tidal waves, and less musical trickles.
There are some exceptions that stand out, most notably the excellent “Our Homes”. The most melodic and flowing number on Heart Attacks, Back to Back…, “Homes” features explosions that fit perfectly within the song, and the track never gets too stripped-down. The album’s finisher, “A Day Outside”, slowly goes into slapdash noise-rock, somewhere between Sonic Youth and Pavement, and any comparison with those alt-gods is a good one. But there’s also the poor vocals on “Chimera”, talking rather than singing, and the record’s nadir, “Comfort”, which goes from a treacly sweet subdued opening into blowing up into emo (though even it broadcasts some quality in its purely instrumental portions).
They say you can’t have good without evil, sin without virtue, etc., and perhaps Kite Operations needs their slow, small parts, so that their big, grand parts will be great. And while Heart Attacks, Back to Back… probably features too much of the former and too little of the latter, it’s really just a matter of balance, not of musical ability. That, Kite Operations has in spades.
