Two years on from receiving plenty of accolades for the charming low-fi indie pop of their debut Swedish Punk, Danish four-piece Kindsight are back with their second album No Shame No Fame. After a four-second feedback squall announces the band with the irresistible ‘Acid Island 45’, a track that sounds a lot more upbeat and cheerful than a song built around a refrain of “She’s got acid in her eyes” really has any right to be. It’s an instant rush that continues the ophthalmic pop theme (could they have created a new genre?) into ‘Eyelids’, an equally immediate song, that marries My Bloody Valentine flavoured guitar action with sweet vocals from Nina Hyldgaard Rasmussen, and sounds a bit like you would imagine Alvvays would sound if they were produced by Kevin Shields – in other words, pretty great!
There are definite C86 stylings at play here, but that’s not to say that Kindsight’s sound is in any way dated – it sounds fresh and vibrant, ‘Love You Baby All The Time’ giving the vocals more room to breathe with a bit more space in the instrumentation and ‘Tomorrow’ dials back the effects a little to come across a little like fellow Scandanavians The Cardiagans, which again is no bad thing. The band’s sound isn’t the most original in the World, but these songs are instantly memorable, by the third or fourth play the album is sounding like a Greatest Hits record.
We are back to the band’s ophthalmic pop (TM) theme with the beautifully understated ‘Killing Eye’, a lovely, melancholic, drum-free number that mixes up the album’s feel a little, and secretly the record’s best song, nowhere near the most instant song of the set but somehow the most hypnotic and addictive is the brilliantly named ‘Madhouse Breakout Multitool’, which circles around and plays around with the song’s structure – you are never quite sure where it’s going and the additional voice (sorry, it’s not clear who it belongs to!) brings some contrast too.
The production work of Joakim Lindberg deserves a mention too – in these days of often overly compressed sounds, the music jumps out of the speakers and has a real punchiness and clarity to it which certainly adds to its appeal. It’s not really a case of clever studio trickery, it’s a case of allowing a band to really make a record where all of its parts can be heard an appreciated – a bit like The Strokes, it sounds very simple on the face of it, but little details emerge as you engage.
If there is one criticism, it’s that the closing track, ‘Easter and the boys’ accounts for over a quarter of the album’s 36 minute running time and it’s hard to see what the closing minutes really add, it’s a good song but does seem slightly overcooked to these ears. That’s a minor point though on an album which is instantly likeable and perfect for the hopefully sunnier days ahead. No Shame No Fame is an assured and highly likeable album and certainly worth just over half an hour of your time. Eye’ll be listening to this all year!
No Shame No Fame is released on 19th April on Rama Lama Records.
