Underwater Kites – Hot Feet (RBM)

Along with RBM, Johanna’s House of Glamour, and Neurotic Cage, Underwater Kites is another of Boston-based experimentalist Bruce MacLeod’s guises, with one prior LP (2003’s Too Much Space) and six EPs going back to 1999’s four-song self-titled debut. Among Hot Feet’s seven tracks (one a 43-second album intro) is a skittish, Peter Gabriel-like revamp of RBM’s 1989 Planet Burgers track “Blue Tangerine,” while “Runes” is an ambient, newsreel-sampled rendition of Johanna’s House of Glamour bandmate Daniel Darrow’s supergroup The Pull of Autumn’s 2018 self-titled debut LP closer “Trance Fear.” There are also lavish, atmospheric covers of Moby Grape’s 1967 self-titled debut LP’s “Sitting By the Window” (which also appeared on The Pull of Autumn’s 2019 second LP Afterglow; see my review in issue 85), The Grateful Dead’s 1970 desert-scorched “High Time” (from their fourth album Workingman’s Dead), and Sarah Records band Brighter’s 1990 single, the piano-led “Noah’s Ark.” Finally, the instrumental title track is a mélange of quirky, ear-tickling sounds. Yet somehow, the soothing-voiced MacLeod weaves this disparate hodgepodge into a blissful origami. (rbmrecords.com)

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