KINSELLA & PULSE LLC - Open Ing Night [CD]

Format: CD
Catalogue No.: CD-KRS-821
Barcode: 0759656082129
Release Date: 18 Apr 2025
Genre: Lo-Fi

The music of the newly re-branded Kinsella & Pulse, LLC—previous albums by the duo were released as Good Fuck and simply Tim Kinsella & Jenny Pulse—contains some of the most forward-thinking postmodern pop of the past decade. Their latest, Open ing Night, follows 2023’s acclaimed Giddy Skelter and delivers a tantalizing left turn that finds the maverick experimentalists’ restless imaginations and formidable skills undiminished. 
While the meticulously crafted audio mosaic Giddy Skelter showcased the duo’s innovative production and skillful sound design, Open ing Night offers listeners a more natural perspective. The fruits of this strategy can be heard, in particular, throughout the entire first half of Open ing Night, a five-part suite recorded in one uninterrupted take that plays more like a well-curated DJ set than a traditional album side. 
Kinsella & Pulse, LLC arrived at this approach following a four-month tour across 
the US and the UK abetted by multi-instrumentalist Theo Katsaounis, who had 
performed alongside Kinsella in Joan of Arc. Fresh from the road, the band de-camped to Sudestudio studios in southern Italy, taking full advantage of the studio’s collection of vintage gear and instruments.
Upon returning to their hometown of Chicago, the band reconnected with longtime collaborator Cooper Crain at the famed Electrical Audio to record additional tunes for the album and add overdubs to the Sudestudio tracks, inventively using the studio to pay homage Steve Albini’s iconic drum sound by re-amping their Roland drum machines through speakers. 
Throughout Open ing Night, songs move in unexpected directions, with hairpin, almost prog-like jump-cuts into breakbeats, field recordings, and studio chatter. Elsewhere, cathartic, Fugazi-worthy anthems collide with vintage Farfisas and 808s, and long outros disintegrate into interludes like the brief but bracing “Brutal”, which sounds a bit like Kevin Drumm deconstructing Konono No.1. This segues, improbably, into “Watch and See,” which begins like the band is about to dive headfirst into a cover of INXS’s “Need You Tonight.” Open ing Night is the sound of three decades of post punk, underground dance music, and the avant garde culminating in a singular vision of smart, mutant pop, adding to a continuum that runs from Davids Bowie and Sylvian all the way to Shudder To Think and Gang Gang Dance. Imagine if SST-era Sonic Youth had been influenced less by Glenn Branca and the Ramones than by Juan Atkins and The Residents. Such is the intoxicating and irresistible duality of Kinsella & Pulse, LLC, who, with Open ing Night, deliver their finest work to date. 

SIDE A
1. Sally
2. Sally—> Love
3. Love
4. The Game, The Play, The Drama, The Dream
5. Quiet

SIDE B
6. Brutal, The Way You Like
7. Brutal—>
8. Watch and See
9. Cracked Factory Wall
10. Immanence