Broken Spindles' stylish, exhausted minimalism

While I was gone, Blurt ran my review of Broken Spindles' Kiss/Kick, the fourth for this Faint side project.

I said...

Kiss/Kick isn't a big album, not filled wall-to-wall with new wavery a la the Faint. Instead, these fleeting, impressionistic songs are riddled with empty space, jagged patches of nothing between blurts of synthesizer and bass. Vocals are whispery, exhausted, insistently neurotic, the last thing you hear in your head at 2 a.m. before you finally drift off. "We all want to fit in," Peterson murmurs, over and over, in the song that bears the same name, a tangle of guitar, a blast of subliminally low bass framing his anxiety, minimally. Later, the barest thud of kick drum, an every-other-measure blast of keyboard tone encases "You're Happy But Not for Long" in the barest sort of gloom. It's Depeche Mode as a line drawing, stripped, sad and boxed in. In fact, even the most insistently rhythmic cuts feel constrained. "A Beat Down Break Up" shimmies on a small square dance floor, every spasm hemmed in with dark claustrophobic space.

And some other stuff

Listen to "Introvert" and "We All Want to Fit In" if that all sounds like a good time...