Are you passionate? Ben Barnett is. Sometimes, he's too passionate for his own good, repelling the very audience he's trying to communicate with. He even opens his latest album-- incredibly his seventh full-length release in just three years-- with a song called "Passionate", wherein he exhorts over a ferocious, feedback-laden rock backdrop, "Let's be passionate/ It's not like we'll get another chance to do this/ Don't be embarrassed/ Go over the top/ But come up from the bottom."
I can't think of a more apt reference point for my experience with Kind of Like Spitting than those last two lines there. My first exposure to the band came earlier this year, when I reviewed their self-titled compilation of early songs. Virtually no moment on that record could really be considered over the top-- frankly, it just wasn't very good. Barnett certainly has come up from the bottom.
Helping him over the top are a cast of friends, some of whom you might recognize from Braid and Death Cab for Cutie, who quickly seem to be attaining Indie Rock Mentor status in the Pacific Northwest. Death Cab's Ben Gibbard is all over this thing, at the piano, behind the drum kit and the backup microphone, where his even, skilled singing is very welcome as a foil to the frequently caterwauling Barnett. His songwriting influence also appears to be lingering in the melodies that Barnett has cooked up here, which have only become exponentially better since those early efforts I referred to before.
For his part, Barnett manages to vacillate between even, subdued singing and an overwrought wail that would make Conor Oberst blush. The middle of the album is largely filled with the former, leaving the latter to rough up the record's edges. "Following Days" is a mid-album highlight, with its propulsive backing (I had no idea Gibbard could play the drums so well) and concise melody. When electrified, Barnett's guitar generally has that lightly distorted tone that bands like Mineral and Sunny Day Real Estate used as their stock-in-trade at the mid-90s height of emocore, and he squeezes a little feedback from it when he has to.
Things reach the height of bombast on "Crossover Potential", an old song that actually appears on the self-titled release that came out earlier this year, albeit in a much more spineless form. Things rise to a thundering climax as Barnett and no fewer than nine accomplices shout out the chorus, peaking on the line "the average woe has no crossover potential" in a display of pained mass catharsis. It's one of several instances where things get just a bit too over the top.
Oddly, I think my favorite track is the last one, "Untitled". Hardly clocking in at fifty seconds, it's a quiet acoustic number whose brevity, sprightly guitar work, and close Barnett/Gibbard harmonies render it endearing in almost the same way that "Her Majesty" seemed a strangely fitting end for Abbey Road. Overall, Kind of Like Spitting have scraped together a pretty decent little rock record that occasionally veers a little too far into overblown emo territory for my tastes. It's not going to change the world or anything, but it sure is passionate.
