Kite Party - Baseball Season

Animal Style Records have this weird habit of typically releasing exclusively awesome records. I'm serious. I bet they do it on purpose or something. Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that their most recent release 'Baseball Season' by the indiepopemopunk group Kite Party is just as excellent as anything else Animal Style puts out for us to freak out over. Let's dig in, or whatever.

(By the way, I typed out a sentence about how I initially saw the email regarding this band as an email regarding a new "Katy Perry" record. Of course, right after I wrote out my short anecdote about this, I realized that Property of Zack already mentioned this little tidbit in their review. Motherfucker. Either way, I get to keep my anecdote in tact just by adding these other sentences to give it context. So, it's cool.)

If I for some reason had to sum 'Baseball Season' up in one word, I'd probably have to go with "relaxing". Because that's seriously what this album is to me. Relaxing. It reminds me of spring and summer and it calms my nerves temporarily, which is definitely a much sought after thing in my life. It reminds me of Sunny Day Real Estate in that sense...but that's probably also due to the fact that they sound like Sunny Day a bit. You know who they don't sound like? Hot Water Music. Thank god. That didn't stop review sites from comparing the two bands, though. Goofy shit, if you ask me.

Kite Party's songs on this record pretty much convey the talent of the musicians as individuals and as a hole. It's like they think of a couple clever ideas, attach them to the same song, and then absolutely refuse to take the easy way out. More cleverness is added in the rhythm section and then once the stakes are higher, the guitar does some cool mid-90s emo shit while the vocals do kind of a Onelinedrawing/Quicksand sort of thing. Overall, it's great. There are nine songs on this 'Baseball Season' record and each of them sit pretty damn well with me. There's absolutely no way you could listen to the song "Arizona" off this album and not be completely convinced of Kite Party's awesomeness. Before I knew the song name I kept picturing that scene from The Lion King with Simba running through the desert...at least that's how the music sounded to me. It sounded like the desert. Then of course it gets to the part where he's singing, "Arizonaaaaaa" and I'm like, "oh shit, it's supposed to remind the listener of a desert." That's some impressive stuff, if you ask me. Or, on the more likely side, I just see way too far into things. I'm a dork. You knew this.

The album closes out with this odd little number called "We Won't Survive." The guitar riff reminds me of something but I honestly can't place my finger on it. It's either a recent pop song or something by Lemuria. That's about as close to the answer as I can get. This song gets incredibly atmospheric part way in, which definitely seems to be a trend with these Kite Party dudes. The only problem I have with this album is actually the way it ends. It feels like it's going into another song, but another song never happens. It's a bit of a let down. I like albums with a solid, brick wall type ending. Where it feels like throughout the album the band is just paving this stone wall, and at the end of the final song this wall is finally finished and we're kind of stuck on one side of it while the band is off on the other side doing science-only-knows what. And that's a good thing. I like when it feels like the final song can't be topped.

I didn't get this effect from 'Baseball Season', but whatever. It's still an excellent debut album from a band that we can hopefully expect a lot of cool shit from in the future. You should definitely check it out, though. You can stream the entire thing for free on punknews right now, or you can pick a record up from the Animal Style website. Your call!

-Idle

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