It’s been six years since we last heard from Kinski and I figured they were done. 2007’s Down Below It’s Chaos featured a band that sounded like it was trying to escape its own skin, veering between their drifting space-rock origins and bludgeoning hard rock. When a band sounds that tired of what it made its name doing on its own record, it can be forgiven for hanging it up afterward.
Kinski haven’t quite hung it up, though, and if you were hoping that they just needed a while to clear their heads before making a sequel to the spaced-out drone and loud-soft post-rock of Don’t Climb on and Take the Holy Water, well, the band doesn’t seem interested in giving it to you. Instead, Cosy Moments doubles down on Down Below’s shift to hard rock, sounding at times like it was made in the band’s hometown of Seattle about 22 years ago. I swear they were listening to Mudhoney and Incesticide on repeat when they wrote “Last Day on Earth", a rampaging, punked-up rocker that flies by in less than two minutes of grunge-y dynamics and walloping drums.
That’s hardly the only blast of crunchy fuzz-- this album only goes directly to the space-rock well once, on the pensive, flute-topped instrumental “We Think She’s a Nurse". Even then, it does it as a set-up for “Let Me Take You Through My Thought Process", the minute-and-twenty-one-second grunge-pop song that closes the album. Chris Martin’s lead vocals never approach the raggedness of Kurt Cobain or Mark Arm, nor does he seem especially mad about anything (the lyrics generally rely on the same love of wordplay as the band’s song titles), and his clipped melodicism combines with the bright fuzztones in a way that oddly brings to mind R.E.M.’s Monster. This too is a sort of outsider’s take on early '90s heavy rock, with just a bit of overt musicianship on display.
There are hints of the old Kinski in places. “Counterpointer” mashes grunge riffs into an odd-metered prog pulp, and the lead guitar on the instrumentals sometimes takes on the spacey character of yore. Overall, though, this is Kinski’s most straightforward rock album, and certainly the Kinski album with the best, most concise vocal songs. If anything, the cranked-up, low-tempo instrumentals are now where the band fares worst. It’s hard to know what most Kinski fans will think of this. They’re basically a new band now-- even more so than last time-- and they sound refreshed by the change.
