One of the great breakthroughs in modern music, well, modern life in general, is the concept of long-distance collaboration. So connected is the world, so accessible are the people in it, and so easy is it to swap ideas and work on projects together from afar, that you can forget the old traditions of band members being in the same room; they don’t even have to be on the same continent. The Kind Hills is such a band, and Little Epiphanies is their third album.
Roman Gabriel, you may know from the most excellent Seasonal Falls, and if there is a similarity between that band and this, it is in a sense of gentleness and well-crafted musical penmanship. If that band errs on the folk side of indie, here we find ourselves immersed in the indie side of pop. Poised, precision, near-perfect pop!
“All Your Promises” is a bustling, urgent opener, the underlying drive contrasted by hazy vocals and chiming guitar licks, a deft dance between understament and groove, “I Love Perth” is a brief love letter to the city where the band members first met as students before they scattered to Brisbane, Lucerne, Perth, London, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong respectively, wonderfully nostalgic, brilliantly succinct and “The Kind Hills” is the dreamy soundtrack to taking some time for yourself.
“Young and Dumb” is the same sort of pop music that the likes of The Sundays used to make, and, like their back catalog, will sound as unaged, relevant, and delicious in 30 or more years too, and finally, “Vegemite” ushers the album out in the form of a heavenly, hushed, 60s-tinged ballad.
Technology is a double-edged sword; the internet and the technology that powers it are often as much reviled as they are regarded as revolutionary. But the fact that The Kind Hills can make music this gorgeous whilst sitting thousands of miles apart is perhaps all the justification needed for its existence.
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