Airs Above Your Station

In short, this may not be an album you'll want to listen to every day, but its disproportionate number of "Holy shit!" moments should earn it a spot close to your stereo.

Filled with the sort of unprofessional, unpretty noodling this genre has been begging for. [Feb 2003, p.68]

A stormy and engrossing sonic stew.

They follow measured guitar burn with bone-rattling explosions, and roll mesmerizing tension into colossal release. [#14, p.138]

Ultimately, the album's drone proves better suited as a break from the explosions than as an end unto itself.

All droning guitars, snail-paced rhythms and bombastic arrangements, songs like "Schedule for Using Pillows & Beanbags" and "Your Lights Are (Out or) Burning Badly" will either raise the hairs on the back of your neck or put you to straight to sleep.

The token swell to storm that has come to characterize the post-rock set seems mailed in here; the build-ups are never ominous, the explosion of guitars never reach the near cacophonous bliss that their heroes so effortlessly visit.

Most indie-somethings will scoff defiantly upon hearing the note-for-note schlepping of excerpts from Mogwai's Young Team or the Sonic Youth-isms dripping from some of the guitar build-ups. Still, the members of Kinski, like a stubborn weed in a thicket of thorns, grow past their numerous predecessors at times, unearthing moments of pure psychotropic bliss.

Too often, Airs Above Your Station feels scattered and fades into the background too easily.

It's all too much like a fumbling Pink Floyd tribute, continually reaching a point where the psychedelica fails to follow up with the required kick, allowing the whole fragile structure to collapse into self-indulgence and bathetic kitsch.