"Have you seen the cover yet?" says Martin by phone from Seattle. (Said cover features noted acting couple John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands striking a melodramatic pose in a 1960s-era shot.) "Any title that we had just seemed way too loaded. It seemed to be commenting on the cover itself. Just at the last minute, we were like, 'Let's just name it like a Led Zeppelin record, whatever number it is.' But none of us could agree on which number it was, because we have an improv record, and splits, and things like that."
Thus this week's release of 7 (or 8), another stellar record from the quartet and its second full album on the Kill Rock Stars label. Kinski is on a short tour to mark the release and will be playing Saturday night at the Hemlock, showcasing the album's striking blend of power-trip psychedelia, sheer hard-rock power, and art-rock focus. The band shared a great split with fellow Seattle band Sandrider earlier in the year, but 7 (or 8) is all Kinski, and from the brawling, queasy riff that kicks off the album in "Detroit Trickle Down," it's another great treat from the group. It's especially so for anyone who loves bad acid vibes, biker rock swagger, and general dawn-of-metal rampages all at once.
"I think we've always had that element in us a little bit," says Martin, "but there was maybe a little more experimental stuff going on on the mid-period records. But we all got to the point where we just wanted to hear really good songs. We throw a lot of stuff out. We even, before the last one, (2013's) Cosy Moments, scrapped an entire record that we had been working on, because it just wasn't right."
Martin later adds that one reason for the scrapped record in question lay with his singing, a fairly new feature in the group's approach. At nearly every stage of its existence Kinski has been a predominantly instrumental affair, with Martin and fellow guitarist Matthew Reid Schwartz going gangbusters while bassist Lucy Atkinson and, since 2004, drummer Barrett Wilke do the same while also driving the rhythms. But a couple of albums back, Martin started adding the occasional vocal part; on this 7 (or 8), his half-drawling half-swaggering singing adds to tracks like "Flight Risk" and "Operation Negligee."
"I just wasn't writing the way that I wanted it," notes Martin, referring again to the scrapped record before Cosy Moments. "And it took me about a year or year and a half of playing live to learn how to sing again. I mean, I had sung in bands before Kinski, but it's sort of like if you didn't touch the guitar for 10 years and then just picked it up again. It definitely took me a while to realize how to do it and how not to overdo it."
One thing that's definitely newer about Kinski as well lies in the album's brevity. Coming out of a general worship of bands with a tendency to sprawl and jam — an early cover version tackled the now legendary Spacemen 3, while a split release over a decade back was done with tour mates and mutual admirers Acid Mothers Temple — Kinski often had a precise rigor serving as an anchor. But 7 (or 8), like Cosy Moments before it, comes in under 40 minutes, something Martin describes as completely intentional:
"We got tired of putting out really long records. Some of our records are 60 minutes, and this one's, I think, 35 or 38. So it's seven songs. I would say this is one of the few records I can listen to from start to finish and be satisfied with, and it's one of the few that we can play live."
There's still room for stretching out — the concluding "Bulletin of the International String Figure Association" almost hits 12 minutes — and it'll be great to see what the band does with that and other numbers onstage this time around. As Martin tells it, the band is now creatively somewhere that definitely results from experience and persistence.
"We have a shorthand with each other, which I think any band that's played for more than six or seven years has. We do stretch out live, and expand or re-expand on the songs. We've all definitely gotten to be a lot better players than when we started. I think we're way less uptight about things now. We're proud that we've held on and gone through some rough times and still kept going."
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