If the word ethereal did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. Like so many other terms in our desperately comprehensive language-- unicorn, utopia, Kevin Federline-- it describes a concept that is essentially nonexistent. Ethereality is more of an absence than an entity, a lacuna in human understanding that encapsulates all things insubstantial and fleeting, intangible and delicate, ineffable and intuitively not-of-this-world. Certain sensations are impossible to explain without it, the diffuse frissons of post-rock (the dreamy, shoegazey '90s variety, not the modern conflated-with-math-rock stripe) ranking high among them.
n Kiss Me Deadly's lusciously ethereal post-rock is leavened with stark contrasts--the tension between languorous shoegaze and kinetic shuffle beats, for instance--but the starkest one is between the band's pulpy name and their pristine music. Kiss Me Deadly is a Mickey Spillane book made into a 1955 film noir by director Robert Aldrich, and there's nothing less ethereal than the bleak, fatalistic archetypes of film noir; every face striped with the hard-edged shadows of moon-obscuring Venetian blinds. As Nitsuh Abebe pointed out in his recent Pitchfork article on '90s post-rock, "early post-rock bands were constantly talking about the moon, with all of its usual connotations: Weightlessness, futurism, blank space, and serenity; dreamy, cerebral moods; and of course the beeps and hums of the old technology that first got people there." As if to signal this affinity, Misty Medley's cover features a contour line drawing of a blank-eyed astronaut gazing past the moon and out of the frame, perhaps at shoes tied at the laces and drifting through space.
Not content to recreate the cerebral palimpsests of Stereolab and Bark Psychosis, Kiss Me Deadly updates classic post-rock swoon with gentle dance rhythms and poppy, lucid song structures. The immediate grabber is Emily Elizabeth's breathy, helium-infused voice, which brims with more chirrups, squeaks, and indelible flourishes than anything this side of Life Without Buildings. As the gliding guitar melody of "Dance 4" finishes chiming out the national anthem of some lunar colony and settles into a fluid cadence, Elizabeth's stage whisper wafts into the mix, culminating in shrill screams that woozily bend into mellifluous vowels. On the lilting "Dance 2", she makes like a human slide-whistle, cooing and squealing about "candy eyes", and on the jittery "Dance 3", she sounds like a club-pop diva who wandered into Echo and the Bunnymen's practice space.
If Elizabeth's voice is exquisitely odd, then Adam Poulin's serviceable croon is a welcome ballast. On "Pop", he rides the stuttering wave toward a grandiose chorus like an indie Bono; on "Let's", he hunkers down in sibilant percussion and a characteristic melody that pairs a dominant, simple guitar figure with a recessed, twitchy lead. The music's most striking quality is that of gliding, which requires equilibrium. Kiss Me Deadly, with their outré female and mundane male vocals, their coasting rhythms and anxious melodies, strikes a balance that holds Misty Medley easily, weightlessly aloft.
