Kaddisfly

Buy Our Intention; We'll Buy You A Unicorn (2005)

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Put aside what might be the most pretentious album title of the year, some pseudo-intellectual filler ("Horses Galloping On Sailboats"), and some pretty self-indulgent song titles ("For The Ejection Of Rest; They'll Dance" and "Let Weight Be Measured By Merit"), and you'll have one very interesting and effective rock album. It's not quite emo, it's not quite prog-rock, it's not quite alt-rock -- it's an amalgam of all those things, but there's still more. There's some space rock, new wave, and some hard rock leanings on Buy Our Intention; We'll Buy You A Unicorn, Kaddisfly's second and first album released nationally through Hopeless Records.

While combining vastly different styles isn't exactly a new thing, especially in the day and age where bands are reaching for anything from the closet to combine with their neo-teenage angst and call it art, Kaddisfly does it a tad bit differently. They put a lot of thought into their songs, whereas most of their competition just kind of throw a bunch of genres together and hope it maks some sort of impact. The band most often vists a spacey kind of emo rock, not too far off from Codeseven at times, but not too close to them either. They also tend to sound like a less-pretentious Brazil, but again, not really -- there's so many bands that Kaddisfly seem to pull from that it's become such a new thing that it's actually hard to identify what sources the sounds originally came from.

The album is really just something you'll have to hear to understand, and you'll need some time before you can really form an opinion. You might hate it at first because it sounds like everything at once, but if you give it a chance, it just might win you over and completely envelop your life. You might even like it a lot at first -- it just depends. Regardless of how you come around, you'll notice how clear this album's production is right off the bat. There's so much attention given to each instrument, and it's rare that an album on an indie label gets as much of a treatment as this one does. Make sure you check out "La Primera Natural Disaster," for it's one of the hardest-hitting tracks on the album, and the delightful "The Calm of Calamity." Hopefully, you'll like it.