I just wanna be someone I recognize
I’m just trying to keep this goddam dream alive
********
Words by Jason Lee
In riding the elevated subway train home a couple nights ago from a mid-week after-hours show held at a well-known LES venue that with its tiny proscenium stage and exposed illuminated bulbs has the sort of seedy, dilapidated glamour of a place you’d expect to see a performance by a failing itinerant family circus act in a late-period Fellini movie (see below!) suddenly we were struck by the desire to listen to the most recent album (see above!) by the self-described “Brooklyn-based four piece dedicated to playing fast and loud” (a willfully unrevealing band profile if ever there was one!) Kissed By An Animal (“KBAA” to the lazy) perhaps cuz KBAA are a central node in the same “faded glamour as if ‘glamour’ ever figured into it but totally ok with being ‘faded’ if not outright luxuriating in it” ex-post-facto slacker-rock scene as the lineup of bands we’d just seen play who together w/their compatriots are known to those in the know as the BandNada Armada…
…but in reality if we’re being honest it was more cuz of the feeling we got as the creaky, greasy metal sarcophagus took off from the Essex-Delancey stop (now $3 per ride; a bargain at any price!) and started going over the Williamsburg Bridge–the inky blackness of the East River reflecting the lights of the Manhattan skyline with its jutting concrete-and-steel silhouettes resembling nothing so much as headstones as it receded off into the distance, it suddenly hits us that we aren’t going anywhere at all at least not in the larger existential sense if you catch my drift (apologies if all this deathly imagery comes off a bit heavy-handed but hey if the music’s heavy!) and if you’ve read this far we’re a’ guessin’ that you do, with KBAA’s Middle Distance blasting through our cans pressed tight up against our ears…
…cuz if there’s any one single album (especially one released this year!) that serves as the perfect soundtrack for when yr having a mild existential crises on the J train and decide to just lean into it, yet also need somethin’ piston-driven-motorik-rhythmed-with-enough-serrated-GrungeJangle™-guitar-shreddage-to-make-both-Peter-Buck-and-J-Mascus-jealous hard rockin’ enuf to keep you from nodding off somewhere in the vicinity of Flushing your life down the toilet Avenue and missing yr stop entirely as you stare off into the middle distance in order to avoid direct eye contact with any of yr fellow life passengers as you ponder yr rudderless existence floating aimlessly, effortlessly over the postindustrial-in-large-part-now-gentrified waterfront then in the slightly rearranged words of one Julian Casablancas, this is it...
…with Kissed By An Animal’s Middle Distance serving as something of a 30-minute meditation on what it feels like to be ensconced so deeply in the midst or the middle of something (like the East River, or an existential funk!) that you in large part forget how or why the journey even began and even moreso how or where it was intended to end up which may sound a bit downcast but at the same time provides one a certain Zen-like “living in-and-for the moment only” clarity as if clarity is much sought after these days but it is amongst the Deli’s readers so give yourself a big pat on the back…
…that could be just the ticket for those of you trying to pry yr Third Eyes open, crusty as they may be from a lifetime’s worth of accumulated gunk made up of endless days’ and nights’ worth of spiritual conjunctivitis not to mention social decay for whom this collection of ditties could be just the ticket (just the token, just the Metrocard, RIP to both!) for delivering the aural equivalent of Third Eye Drops you’ve long searching for in vain tho’ we make no promises, of course (results may vary!)…
…on an album that ain’t afraid to go a little dark or even a bit morose at times (thematically, but never sonically!) tho’ always with a gleam of fatalistic humor in its eye yet at the same time vibrant and blazingly alive much like lead-singer-songwriter Dima Drjuchin’s garishly psychedelic visual art with its riot of bright, primary colors and melting surfaces something like Ralph Bakshi on even more acid but less X-rated or Stanley Donwood in a much better mood, comprised of eleven tracks that’re pensive and witty to be sure but at the same time electrifyin’ as the train’s third rail in a drunken baker’s dozen of tunes propelled by sleek, metallic textures and crackling, livewire tension as they navigate the human condition on songs like the opening…
…“Confusion’s Trying to Win” which right off the bat establishes the central fulcrum of the album’s philosophy played out over its subsequent ten tracks thus serving an an effective opening volley in the LP’s unceasing fight against entropy (well, 29 minutes of fight anyway!) in a fittingly shambolic yet tight-as-a-mosquito-leotards manner which is just over two minutes manages to present the listener with a couple pleasantly jangly verses as well as the first of many soaring choruses that’ll lodge in your the crevices of yr brain’s grey matter like a box full of musical Milk Duds dumped into your cerebellum plus a seemingly tossed-off-yet-perfectly-formed guitar solo with hooks slyly strewn about plentifully as mines in theStraitof Hormuz as its gently insisted that the one thing one can reliably know in most situations is that you’ll never know y’know (read: whatever! never you mind!) and that the past is the present of the future whatever that means (sounds Buddhist to us!)…
…as track two “Midnight Rats” opens by admitting that, far from some outdated Gen Xer/Elder Millennial ideal of I’m a loser baby / why don’t you heal me? anti-sellout fetishism, the truth of staying indie and underground has far less to do with ideals or “integrity” than simply a lack of opportunity presenting itself which hey “to-ma-to: vs. “to-mah-toe” ammirite tho’ to be fair it’s this candor around the dreaded concept of “authenticity” in indie rock even all these years later that helps make Middle Distance such a resonant album lyrically as well as musically esp. for those of us attempting to gracefully age disgracefully with a series of curt tough-love, self-effacing aphorisms that must have “Curt” Cobain spinning in his grave with undead admiration…
“Please feel free to say no to me / dont wanna burden you with my self-advocacy”
“Is it even art / is it even art / or is it just a bag of tricks?”
“Wasn’t daydreaming / was just disassociating”
“Trapped in the hell of believing in myself / feel like I used to be someone / but I’m not anymore / but I’m not anymore!”
…with the latter sentiment declared not with the self-loathing regret one may expect but with a catchy major-key melody and overall triumphant sheen one may associate more with an aspirational butt-rock anthem or sunshine-pop singalong than with a band of self-effacing slackers who still play semi-secret gigs charging a $5 cover and $3 for PBRs in their cramped practice space (the fabled East Williamsburg Econolodge—EWEL for short—DM for details!) with those last several lines taken from the LP’s ultra-anthem among anthem “My Body is the Animal That Carries Me (From Place to Place)” on a song that (and we love this) opening celebrates the psychological defense mechanism of disassociation with it’s title line preceded by the observation that “when I think of myself / I don’t think of my face” but with the jubilant ego-dissolution offset by the sobering realization that “it’s the lunatics who have all the confidence” that makes us think that if W.B. Yeats had even written a pop-song version of his poem “The Second Coming” (the best lack all conviction / while the worst are full of passionate intensity!) that it may’ve sounded a lot like this…
…with the latter sentiment declared not with the self-loathing regret one may expect but with a catchy major-key melody and overall triumphant sheen one may associate more with an aspirational butt-rock anthem or sunshine-pop singalong than with a band of self-effacing slackers who still play semi-secret gigs charging a $5 cover and $3 for PBRs in their cramped practice space (the fabled East Williamsburg Econolodge—EWEL for short—DM for details!) with those last several lines taken from the LP’s ultra-anthem among anthem “My Body is the Animal That Carries Me (From Place to Place)” on a song that (and we love this) opening celebrates the psychological defense mechanism of disassociation with it’s title line preceded by the observation that “when I think of myself / I don’t think of my face” but with the jubilant ego-dissolution offset by the sobering realization that “it’s the lunatics who have all the confidence” that makes us think that if W.B. Yeats had even written a pop-song version of his poem “The Second Coming” (the best lack all conviction / while the worst are full of passionate intensity!) that it may’ve sounded a lot like this…
…with all the album’s convictions and contradictions more than ably supported by Tsugumi Takashi’s commanding bass lines (wintessed live, T.T. comes across something like the spirit of Dee Dee somehow magically transposed into the body of a dark-shades-wearing Asian chick aka the last living Ramone who today fittingly plays in a few of the hipper post-hipster Williamsburg bands out there like Eye Roller and Hard Nips and AnChikSho all whilst running the art gallery and performance space C5BK), Jon F. Daily’s alternately thumping/thrumming/thrashing drumming always perfectly in service to the song (Jon runs BandNada and the Econolodge shows on the side which btw if you you know the man you know is less a case of nepotism than selfless service to the scene or one ‘em anyway), and by the the additional undergirding guitar-and-backing-vocals-and-occasional-keyboard-contributions of Hiro Williams…
…and finally in closing we must insist that even if you avoid the rest of the album like the Black Plague with a bad case of AIDS, SARS, and COVID still we implore you to listen to the track “God Haters Money” if you can manage it which despite the gloriously floating-above-it-all or underneath-it-all tenor of the rest of an LP seemingly dedicated to “letting go” it’s a nice surprise to find tucked away on its penultimate track an important and timely “statement song”, trenchantly-yet-unpretentiously-observed, that in no way comes across as “statement-y” but which one could argue should be required listening for many if not most of Earth’s inhabitants today, Americans in particular, as it hammers home the simple yet far-too-infrequently-stated-and-vital-to-our-survival point that “if God is real / then God hates money”…