COSY MOMENTS

Listening to Kinski's year 2013 album might leave you wondering what the heck this band is doing on a Progressive Rock website. They may have started life as a more experimental psych-rock ensemble, but clearly that agenda has shifted in recent years, coinciding with a change of record label prior to this session.

It was the quartet's first album after a five-year silence, and found the band playing shorter, harder songs, precision-tooled for local Seattle kids looking for a noisy afterparty. Some of the music is incredibly catchy: "Last Day on Earth"; "Conflict Free Diamonds"; "Skim MILF" (another in a series of hilarious Kinski song titles); and so forth. Add Pete Shelley's adenoidal voice to any of the above and you might find something resembling a long-lost Buzzcocks single.

But the few instrumental tracks work best, and show the lingering influence of the band's Krautrock adolescence. Note the convincing motorik rhythm under "A Little Ticker Tape Never Hurt Anybody", and again in "We Think She's a Nurse" (...quoting Brian Eno, "repetition is a form of change")

The album might have been a natural progression from their previous "Down Below It's Chaos" (2007), but that doesn't make it Prog. Two stars (at best), from a Progressive Rock point-of-view, but three (or more) on an Ass-Kicking scale, especially when played loud enough to rattle your sub-woofers.