Kindling
Everywere Else
SPIN says: "Summer is not generally shoegaze season - its hard to really submerge in a sea of guitars when youre already swimming in humidity to begin with. But the best dream-pop isnt weather-dependent, and Everywhere Else, first full-length from Easthampton, Massachusetts sonic storm-chasers Kindling, is worth diving into even on the thickest of August afternoons. Everywhere Else pairs vocals as sweet as the best Pity Sex or My Bloody Valentine jams with a heaviness that goes beyond black-metallic, drums and guitars bringing the attack as much from below as above" Everywhere Else: A vague sense of want, of escape, or of resignation. Reconciling the limitations of your surroundings with the endlessness of earthly potential. Kindling has made their home in this space: between the dirt and the stars, conscious of the weight of life's anchors, trying to outpace and shed them. Building on the foundation of 2015's Galaxies EP, the band has zoomed out on the map to present a fuller view of their topography: the succinct punk-influenced noise-pop of Galaxies refocused into what is at turns scorchingly anthemic and quietly understated fuzzed-out bliss on Everywhere Else. The band - led by Stephen Pierce and Gretchen Williams - spent a week at Sonelab in rural Easthampton, MA with Justin Pizzoferrato (Dinosaur Jr, Pixies, Speedy Ortiz, Sonic Youth, etc.), resulting in a dynamically layered monolith of towering guitar noise & wistfully hazy vocals, balancing deafening heaviness with a lightness and beauty; a pop sensibility rarely found when the volume and attack ends up this far in the red. From the opening barrage of Coma through the droning guitar outro of Became, Everywhere Else is a geography of peaks and valleys, demonstrating dramatic growth in the short months between it & the Galaxies EP. With their most clearly defined and ambitious set of songs to date, Kindling has taken a leap forward, exploring far beyond the outer reaches of the blueprints laid out thus far, at once cloaked in shadow and drenched in sunlight, celestial but distinctly of this world.