The Kindness of Strangers
And It Was These Thoughts That Brought Me Here (2010)
Brian Shultz
It feels weird to say a band is "firmly rooted" in something that isn't even a decade old, but the Kindness of Strangers definitely feel like a band raised on a variety of 2000s emo rock--the mediocre kind, though.
And It Was These Thoughts That Brought Me Here bears five songs; like the title, most of them are a little too long and not articulated terribly well. A few of these songs, like "Hold, Heavy Earth" and "Empty Place," have that sort of emo-influenced, quasi-alternative/hard rock feel while subtly incorporating a dance beat about it--think Armor for Sleep. The effort at flow is well-intentioned, but it starts a transition between these two songs way too early toward the former's finish; the intro to "Empty Place" is basically the last 5-10 seconds of "Hold, Heavy Earth"--if you had this song come up on shuffle it would sound really ill-placed.
Where the band succeeds most is in the guitars, which sound rightly thick and rife with varied, well-thought out riffs. They can get cheesy, though--take "Me, Grinning" and its inferred "dirty south" flair thrown about. I mean, granted they could've gone really overboard and thrown in a legit breakdown and terrible snarling--oh, wait, these things kind of are in this song. I guess the band's idea of these things aren't nearly as bad as that of all the abysmal post-Hot Damn! clones surfacing, but they'd be better off without it, probably. "Persona" has a few more of these mosh parts oddly integrated and while they don't stick out terribly, they're definitely pretty weird for this type of sound. Not Akissforjersey weird, but still.
Despite their efforts the rest of the EP doesn't really elicit any sort of real emotion or outright feeling. But that's not to say this is totally lifeless, bullshit stuff--just not all that good.