My immediate reaction on hearing Kill it Kid’s frankly exciting debut: ‘where the hell did these guys come from?’ it’s rhetorical of course (Bath, if you’re wondering); they just sound a million miles from pretty much anything around right now. Its snarling blues and ragtime music delivered with a hard rock edge; bourbon-tinged melodies riding enormous guitar riffs, it’s consistently great, quite often incendiary, stuff.
The opening strains of first track, blues-rocker ‘Heaven never seemed so close’ make a sizeable statement; overdriven guitar collides with violin in exciting ways while frontman Chris Turpin, with a touch of the histrionic about him, belts out his vocals with gusto. The result is an epically-proportioned classic rock sound and there’s plenty more where that came from.
Not that Kill it Kid don’t mix it up here: co-vocalist stroke pianist Stephanie Ward brings another angle to the table with her luscious stylings, most devastatingly dueting with Turpin on the wrenching love-gone-wrong number ‘Fool for loving you’, an album standout that’s gorgeously brooding. And those two tracks are more or less the album in microcosm; time is divided fairly evenly between the rocking and the more intimate moments and the songwriting is accomplished throughout.
There isn’t much bad to say about this album, in fact, I can’t think of anything; it’s a very strong, totally unique record. Future classic? Don’t bet against it.
