More like [insert word][insert same word]!…
[Video][Websote]
[4.75]
Patrick St. Michel: Maybe they should try to not be so busy busy.
[3]
Iain Mew: They still sound like a kind of Prog Dies in Hot Cars, jerky urgency somehow undiluted by all of the curveballs thrown alongside. Still incomprehensible lyrically, too, though I think I make out the word “deets” in there alongside intriguing snatches of holy ghosts and crawling down corridors. What “Kemosabe” has in its favour that they don’t manage often is that it flows smoothly despite everything that’s going on — “weirdly gentle” as John Seroff put it last time they managed that, or at least as gentle as anything with that voice could get. Would possibly sound amazing as another Lianne La Havas cover.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Boasting the oddest voice I’ve heard in weeks — Pete Townshend singing Bloc Party’s “Helicopters” — this crew deserved a fair hearing. But purloining the electronic pitter-pat and look-how-pretty guitar ripples from Kid A-era Radiohead isn’t my idea of everything everything (Kid A isn’t everything everything either). Finally — “I’m genuflecting in a genuine way”? Is there another way? Nobody thought you knew how to give head, boy.
[4]
Anthony Easton: I like the abstracted vocals in the introduction, and I like how the whole thing glitters like a unicorn, and the end bit is lovely. I could do without the way he pronounces “border” though.
[4]
Jer Fairall: The band’s name hints at their sheer heedless maximalism: there may or may not have been an actual kitchen sink involved in the making of “Kemosabe,” but the song is so manic in its construction, so strained in its attempted eclecticism, that no single element–not the soaring vocal on the chorus, not the jerky stutter of the synths, not a single indecipherable lyric — is ever present long enough to actually register as anything at all.
[4]
Brad Shoup: It’s like “Harder to Breathe” covered by… The Fixx? With no clues beyond that fluttering synth, I was hoping we’d found some futuristic banda. But no, it wasn’t approximating an accordion, it was dredging up the “Reading Rainbow” theme.
[4]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Could you imagine “Kemosabe” even being a demo, as if Jonathon Higgs sat with an acoustic guitar in his bedroom, strumming away? There’s so much going on here working as part of the same functioning body — skittish vocal performances, parping synth-basslines, AOR wailing choruses, kitchen-sink percussion – that it feels difficult to see the seams where the song was built. “Kemosabe” feels like it was born to be this way and no other way, which is exciting to hear in a song – the right to be heard.
[7]
Ian Mathers: Don’t you hate it when a bunch of guys name themselves after something you love just to 1. make mediocre music that 2. sounds nothing at all like the thing they named themselves after anyway? Plus, didn’t anyone around tell these bros that maybe 2013 isn’t a great time to try and reclaim the word “kemosabe”? A shame, that chorus might have been decent with a little work, maybe a less strained falsetto.
[5]