KISSES - The Heart Of The Nightlife

A case of a side project becoming more compelling than the main act. Los Angeles native Jesse Kivel is in fact the mastermind, together with his twin brother and another friend, of the Princeton, a symptomatic preppy-pop band (don't ask us to explain exactly what that means) with refined literary tastes, which in 2009 released "Cocoon Of Love", a certainly unmemorable album, soon overshadowed by the far too heavy (and merciless) comparison with Vampire Weekend. Kivel now returns with his kindred spirit Zinzi Edmundson, altering (though not too much) the direction of his musical fantasies, with the new project Kisses.

Another indie-twee-pop duo, another album written and recorded with feet on the bed and a laptop on the knees? Yes and no. The duo's proposal tends to settle into a chill-wave or hypnagogic glo-fi register, built on New Order-like little keyboards tinged with nostalgia, intimate melodies in perfect Sarah Records style (Kivel's timbre can't help but recall the romantic reticence of a Jens Lekman), and a lukewarm, Ibiza-like light that dulls perception into a phlegmatic, floating suspension of bright images. Lively postcards like "Bermuda", "People Can Do..." (truly remarkable) or "Midnight Lover" reveal a familiarity with the language of pop songwriting that is anything but superficial, which, alongside the celebrated Washed Out and Toro Y Moi, weaves virtuous ties with certain Tough Alliance (a group that has not yet fully received the critical recognition it deserves), as well as with the more recent Animal Collective and Caribou, reducing it all to the minimal scale of a small sonic miniature, a song-as-souvenir.

With a touch of chamber exoticism at heart and a Junior Boys-style romanticism diluted with ice in a glass of barley water, "The Heart Of The Nightlife" spins in place without ever really moving an inch, like an inflatable duck in a pool silently imagining the shape of the sea.

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10/02/2011