#this is the kit

[laurierollitt]

My poster design for This Is The Kit's performance at the Barbican Centre November 25th 2023.

[fidjiefidjie]

Bonne soirée 🆕️ 🫶💟

This Is The Kit 🎶 More Change

(Careful Of Your Keepers)

[thequietabsolute]

Four favourites daily 🎨 # 33

link to this spotify mixtape

[dustedmagazine]

Tim Clarke’s 2023: Ears on the Prize

1. Rozi Plain — Prize (Memphis Industries)

Even though it was released way back in January, Prize is such an understated album that it nearly slipped under my radar completely. It popped up on some mid-year lists, including that of Dusted’s Margaret Welsh. The initial hook for me is that Rozi Leyden plays bass in This is the Kit (see my #3), but I had no idea she wrote and released her own music. From initial listens I was utterly beguiled, the economy of the songwriting and the richly colorful arrangements drawing me into obsessive repeat listens. Prize is a supremely absorbing and gently uplifting album, and one that I’ve played and enjoyed more than any other this year. Its beauty and clarity gradually reveal subtle, intoxicating depths.

2. Jana Horn — The Window is the Dream (No Quarter)

If Prize dominated my listening in the second half of 2023, it was The Window is the Dream that took pride of place in the first half — and it was one of my picks in the Mid-Year Exchange. They’re similarly oblique and alluring albums, but Horn’s record is shot through with a shadowy disquiet that seems to evoke a love gone sour. The chemistry among Horn’s band, especially the standout turn from electric guitarist Jonathan Horne, is truly something to behold, and elevates this superficially simple album into another realm entirely.

3. This is the Kit — Careful of Your Keepers (Rough Trade)

Rozi Leyden has played a key role in not one but two of my favorite albums of the year. The second is This is the Kit’s Careful of Your Keepers, notably produced by Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys. Rhys shepherded the long-standing indie-folk band to create their best album to date, on which Kate Stables’ intimate songwriting is given a fresh, expansive dimension.

4. Wilco — Cousin (dBpm)

It was producer Cate Le Bon’s involvement in Wilco’s latest that piqued my interest, but thankfully Jeff Tweedy and co. have also brought their A-game on this one. Supposedly conceived pre-pandemic and then shelved, Cousin is a gloriously deep and emotionally engaging album from a band who have always seemed, to me, on the verge of creating something great, but never quite get over the line. With Le Bon’s help, Cousin takes a confident step beyond.

5. Pile — All Fiction (Exploding in Sound)

It’s taken for granted that Pile can dole out cathartic, noisy guitar records, but All Fiction feels different. Rick Maguire, Alex Molini and Kris Kuss maintain the electric dynamic they’ve always possessed, but shift their focus onto making the music between the crescendos more immersive and textural. It works brilliantly.

6. Meg Baird — Furling (Drag City)

Furling was released so early in the year, and so much great music has been released since, that it’s easy to forget just how good it is. As noted in my Dusted review, “Baird’s voice is an instrument of rare beauty, simultaneously assured and elusive, like a soft-focus Sandy Denny wandering in a fever dream.” When you situate such a voice within some of Baird’s best songs to date and embellish them with sensitive playing by her partner, Charlie Saufley, you’ve got a record of enduring beauty.

7. Devendra Banhart — Flying Wig (Mexican Summer)

Flying Wig is the second album on this list to be produced by Cate Le Bon. Here, Le Bon’s aesthetic is writ large, from the melancholy drift of the synth arrangements to the heavily modulated saxophone parts. Through it all Banhart sounds acutely lonely, while also luxuriating in the beauty of his musical backing. It’s a heady vibe, that’s for sure.

8. King Krule — Space Heavy (XL)

There are few musicians who simultaneously come across as hopelessly spaced out and gutturally pissed off at the same time. Archy Marshall is one of them, and his latest album drifts even further into dislocation and bewilderment than 2020’s stellar Man Alive!

9. Arrowounds — In the Octopus Pond (Lost Tribe Sound)

No other album released this year has quite sounded like Arrowounds’ In the Octopus Pond. It’s a singular and immersive blend of ambient and post-rock that evokes exemplary reference points such as Bark Psychosis, Dif Juz, and The World On Higher Downs. And if you enjoy this, Ryan Chamberlain has released another three albums this year, each venturing in a different direction.

10. Cory Hanson — Western Cum (Drag City)

Wand’s Cory Hanson put out his excellent second album, Pale Horse Rider, in 2021. It features a little six-string extroversion here and there, but doesn’t quite prepare the listener for album number three. Western Cum is Hanson in full guitar-hero mode; his playing is absolutely blistering. Though nothing on the album quite surpasses early single “Housefly” for sheer wind-in-your-hair thrills, Western Cum is a supremely enjoyable rock record, built to be played loud.

Also excellent (in alphabetical order):

Activity — Spirit in the Room (Western Vinyl)

Daniel Bachman — When the Roses Come Again (Three Lobed)

BCMC — Foreign Smokes (Drag City)

Califone — Villagers (Jealous Butcher)

James Ellis Ford — The Hum (Warp)

PJ Harvey — I Inside the Old Year Dying (Partisan)

Tim Hecker — No Highs (Kranky)

Blake Mills — Jelly Road (New Deal / Verve Forecast)

The Necks — Travel (Northern Spy / Fish of Milk)

Andy Shauf — Norm (Anti-)

[thejokebox]

Stuck in a room, try and sit still. Try and sit still, try to stand up.

[sinceileftyoublog]

This Is The Kit & Gruff Rhys Live Show Review: 10/19, Lincoln Hall, Chicago

This Is The Kit's Kate Stables

BY JORDAN MAINZER

On This Is The Kit's latest album Careful Of Your Keepers (Rough Trade), Kate Stables asks many questions without expecting answers to all of them. "When are we gonna get there, when are they?" "If we're holding hands, will we walk at the same speed?" "Boy, I'm talking to you, are you listening?" Okay, maybe that last one is easy (he's definitely not listening), but for the most part, Stables' philosophical quandaries and mantra-like repetitions are metaphors for the uneasy and paradoxical nature of relationships and time. "This is a how shit is this measuring stick," she sings, tongue twisted, on album opener "Goodbye Bite", having difficulty pinpointing exact beginning and ending points of certain eras in her life. If vagaries are the name of the game for This Is The Kit, the band's live performance last Thursday at Lincoln Hall brought to life, via instrumentation, Stables' gently agitated state.

This Is The Kit's Stables and Rozi Plain

Take "Goodbye Bite", and its concoction of sinewy guitars, bass, synth, and woodwinds: When you're listening to it, it feels like it's encircling your brain, threatening to wedge its way in. Stables, bassist Rozi Plain, guitarist Neil Smith, and drummer Lucien Chatin made sure it finally did when presented live, with a looser structure. Holding it all together, though, was Stables' voice, smoky in contrast to the wiry guitars of "Slider", seeming like it wanted to leap off the page on "Stuck in a Room", a song about wanting to leave where you are but having to stay. Stables' deft delivery sported the stamina of an MC, but over the band's taut music, it sounded like it was bursting at the seams. The elastic-rigid dynamic made its way to even old songs, like on the interplay between Stables' spritely banjo and Chatin's controlled toms on "Bullet Proof".

This Is The Kit

I should emphasize one more time: Just because Stables--and really, almost all people--has trouble quantifying abstractions like time, doesn't mean the band can't show off their tightness. On the Nick Drake lilt of "This Is When The Sky Gets Big", Stables and Plain staggered their harmonies to stunning effect. "Inside Outside" captivated with a jazzy groove. Really, the main image on "Scabby Head and Legs", that of a pigeon who holds eggs too tight and breaks them, seems like a warning signal for the band itself, who instead follow Stables' repeated advice of "cutting once, measuring twice." Yet, they break the rules when they want to, as long as they know that they're breaking the rules. Or, as Stables sings on "Dibs", "Let's pretend to not know that we're out of time."

Gruff Rhys

Though This Is The Kit's growth is certainly organic, enlisting Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals as producer on Careful Of Your Keepers is as natural a match as I can remember in recent memory, his experimental whimsy bringing out just enough circular strangeness to the band's sound. Lucky for us, Rhys gave an opening set on Thursday, which meant that he did come out to do backing vocals on a couple TITK songs like on the record. It also meant we got to hear some unreleased songs from his upcoming album Sadness Sets Me Free, the title track, "Bad Friend", and the already released "Celestial Candyfloss" among them. That Rhys played mostly an acoustic set meant he didn't give away what the new songs sound like on record. For one, he admitted to not knowing them very well. The finger-picked guitars on "Celestial Candyfloss" are totally overshadowed by the orchestral chamber pop of the studio version. Sure, some back catalog highlights, like "Lonesome Words" and the metronome-laden "If We Were Words (We Would Rhyme)", were not far cries from their respective studio versions. But Rhys was able to play with volume and his ever-changing distance from the microphone to create a sonic spaciousness on "Pang!" and the melancholy hum of "Shark Ridden Waters". Best, these versions may eventually see the light of day, as Rhys claimed he was recording for a live album, as he held up title cards to a surprisingly sparse crowd that said things like, "Generic audience reaction" so we knew when to cheer. He didn't have to, though. Those of us who were there knew it wouldn't be every day we'd be able to witness two forcefully creative entities on the same night: Our cheers were constant.

[senorboombastic]

a/s/l: This Is The Kit

Remember the days of the old schoolyard? Remember when Myspace was a thing? Remember those time-wasting, laborious quizzes that everyone used to love so much? Birthday Cake For Breakfast is bringing them back!  Every couple of weeks, an unsuspecting band will be subject to the same old questions about dead bodies, Hitler, crying and crushes.   This Week: Ahead of releasing new album ‘Careful Of…

[r-truth]

[shepherdingthepie]

alright tumblr, I need to know

Hey uh do me a favor and reblog this! I wanna reach as many users as possible with this one

[foxpost-generator]

Five Stars part 2/2

By KitMills

[cy-lindric]

Jo and Roach, girls for a wlw short story about vampires and legal disputes in south Paris

[dustedmagazine]

This Is the Kit — Careful of Your Keepers (Rough Trade)

Photo by Cedric Oberlin

Careful Of Your Keepers by This Is The Kit

This Is the Kit’s new album, Careful Of Your Keepers, has a wonderfully languid, rolling, fluid quality. This is partly down to the immediacy of Kate Stables’ song-writing and her crisply enunciated singing voice; partly down to her ongoing chemistry with fellow players Neil Smith (guitar), Rozi Leyden (bass), and Jamie Whitby-Coles (drums); and partly down to producer Gruff Rhys’s intimate yet expansive production. Though some of the song titles appear to allude to the trials and tribulations of the last few years (“Inside Outside,” “Doomed or More Doomed,” “Stuck in a Room”), there’s also a hopeful tone of resilience (“This Is When the Sky Gets Big,” “Careful of Your Keepers”) that runs through all of the songs.

The interplay between the musicians is central to the satisfying immersive instrumental backing, immediately apparent in the first two songs, “Goodbye Bite” and single “Inside Outside.” Guitars, drums and bass interlock in intricate yet flowing shapes, gently pushing and pulling in different directions, occasionally bolstered by piano, woodwinds, brass, and synths. A spidery banjo weaves through early standout “Take You to Sleep,” swelling synth underpinning a gorgeous chord change before the main groove carries the song through Stables’ mantra-like vocals. Rhys lends his reassuringly deep and gentle backing vocals to “More Change” and “This Is When the Sky Gets Big,” and the title track foregrounds drum, bass and piano parts that come across like Radiohead’s “House of Cards,” or Tortoise at their most beatific. 

Repetition plays a key role throughout the record, as if each musician is trying to wring as much out of their parts as possible. Stables returns to lyrical ideas at various points in the album — such as friendship, forgiveness, and seeking wisdom and solace in nature — as if reflecting on these themes from a different angle each time, getting a measure of them, and reiterating their importance. By the time plaintive closer “Dibs” rolls around, embellished with vibraphone and twanging guitar leads, Stables gently implores, “Rest your heart on my heart / Be OK, be OK” — it feels as though the band has done everything in their power to play a small part in helping things work out. 

Tim Clarke

[chan0]

So my friend got me this hatsune miku model kit

I finished building the head and...

NOBODY TOLD ME SHE HAS FREAKING CRAB MODE?!?!