Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
For those of a certain disposition who still find music on the radio in which to drop everything and sit down in a mind boggled sigh of exultation, KynchinLay’s new E.P. Drink Me is a remembrance of days when the likes of Tommy Vance or the great John Peel would play magician and startle you with a set of songs so good that you just knew the world, despite its woes, would carry on. For surely the Universe would not destroy the planet just yet; especially when the vast majority haven’t had the pleasure of taking in one more amazing track.
It starts with a beat, the riff of a guitar and the exhale of breath, not just from the group but from the listener, as the two combine to make sure the weeks ahead have something to grasp onto and in time the memory of where you were when you heard the music for the first time.
As honest and open as they come, KynchinLay’s music rivets a join between hope and expectant pleasure, the weld is strong and the songs true. They bustle and pulse with life, the anger of several generations pounding in the same way that some of the great rock bands to come out of real life managed to do but in a way that sounds fresh and as cool as James Coburn throwing a knife with perfect accuracy from 50 yards.
The E.P. seems to encompass more than the normal expectation. The mixture of the type of song that a marriage between Liverpool and Birmingham heroes Space and Twang would produce, the offspring lively, bouncy, wonderfully precocious and cared for, the superb Dogfathers. The musically conquering Public Execution with its dystopian feel and the thoughts of destruction of a civilisation, not from a foreign power but by its own people and the excellent opener Leave Me Alone all make sure what you feel is having gone down some rabbit hole, to appear at a time when music really grabbed you by gut for the first time. It is never too late to find another band in which to hold up to the Universe and say, “Don’t kill us yet, the musical elixir might work with this one!”
It might be hard to find an E.P. that generates as much desire and the urge to acquire as Drink Me does this year but it will, as always be fun trying.
Ian D. Hall