When Kinski put together this album, they seem to have left the melodies in the box-- most of the tracks simply don't have one. Opener "Hot Stenographer" has a nearly full-minute passage where all it does is go "buh! Buh! Buh! Buh! Buh!" until the fade-out-- fuzzed-out guitar and drums slamming every beat while nothing else happens. Other than that, the song is merely a neat riff without a song surrounding it.
Alpine Static is full of fine musicianship, but there are a lot of songs that feel like something's missing, and that's a syndrome that I've noticed on truckloads of recent instrumental albums, including a few previous Kinski efforts. It's unfortunate that so many vocal-less seem allergic to offering the listener something to latch onto beyond a wall of fuzzy guitar and an occasional tempo shift.
To their credit, Kinski do sometimes give you more than just riffs and drums fills on Alpine Static, such as the tweaked-out solos that rampage over "The Wives of Artie Shaw" (guess you gotta solo if you're gonna name a track after Shaw). The thing is, Kinski in rock mode, where they spend the majority of this LP, is Kinski at their weakest, considerably less interesting than when they put on their other hat, which is made of elegantly sculpted, brooding space-noise. Their last record, 2004's Don't Climb on and Take the Holy Water, focused on this sound to often arresting results, but this album mostly sounds like backpedaling until "All your Kids Have Turned to Static", a slowly meandering piece of pastoral psych with flute coloring the edges. It's the only track of its kind in the Kinski catalog, and it's one of their best.
Unfortunately, it's only an island in a sea, and that sea churns with distortion and kickdrum, frequently feeling directionless. "The Snowy Parts of Scandinavia" has a promising intro of slowly morphing ambience, but it devolves into an inept rip-off of Mogwai's "Like Herod" before churning into what sounds like a Sonic Youth outtake, circa 1991. So the album as a whole is intensely frustrating. Kinski have the potential, the skill, the other requisite intangibles to be awe-inspiring, but somehow they keep shooting left of the mark.
