My favorite kinski album...
12/30/2005
(5 out of 5 stars)
"SHOPPERS, TAKE NOTE: this album contains some of the most sublime noodling and noise you are likely to hear your stereo system emit. Truly!
Kinski is an excellent band from Seattle. If you are open to the musical possibilities of unfamiliar sounds, sonic textures and song structures, then you will be very pleased with any of their albums. They are alternately described as post-psyche, experimental, space-rock, ambient, noise-rock, and so on.
Don't Climb On is made up of five tracks, four of which (1,3,4,5) frame the one track that really matters (2): The Misprint in the Gutenberg Printshop. A 29-minute improvisational performance, performed live (to a seemingly very small audience), Misprint is an amazingly beautiful composition, one of the most organic, ethereal, and suggestive pieces of music I have ever heard. I rank Misprint right up there with the very best of Popul Vuh---that is, it's a half-hour of sound which reaffirms what I believe to be true about the spiritual capacity of human beings. It's really that fricking good!
The sound of Misprint (and the rest of the album as well) is hard to describe. There is a lot of spiralling guitar feedback, unusual shimmers, etc., but it's all layered in such a way as to sound completely natural, coherent and emotionally honest. The noise of the guitars (which reaches points of near-saturation at times) is balanced nicely with a very tranquil sounding flute. There are rises and falls. There aren't any vocals (or even any percussion, I think) to interrupt the flow. The effect is gorgeous and encourages all kinds of (inadequate) metaphorical comparisons: it's like watercolor, like spending a year on the desert and watching the storms, like observing sentient robots performing Tai Chi on some distant moon. Kinski is one of the bands of the last five years which restored my faith in music (and the commerce thereof).
Don't Climb On and Take the Holy Water---contemplative, raw, disturbing, serene. It's very moving. You will not be disappointed!"