Providence, Rhode Island's Brother Kite make music that floats, tethered to the ground by the thinnest of strings. Their music glows a bit as well, in the same way a cloud or a contrail glows at sunset, bright at the edges with a sober-hued core. The shoegazer tag will be misapplied to them, if it hasn't been already, even though the imperfect label that suits them better is probably power pop. Sure, their songs are coated in big sheets of guitar and synth, but at their heart they have more in common with Superdrag (especially in the vocals) and Teenage Fanclub than Ride or My Bloody Valentine.
Waiting for the Time to Be Right, the band's second album, is nicely balanced, flowing with ease from gigantic ballads to sugar-spiked, double-tracked vocals stacked on quick beats that sound like something Brian Wilson might have dreamed up if his musical resources had been limited to guitars and reverb. "The Coat of Arms" kicks the record off with a three-minute instrumental intro. It's a rush of thoroughly blended guitar and synth that boils itself down to a simple organ figure as the drums retreat. The first vocals you hear drift in the echo as they gradually build-- like the instrumental section-- into a swirl of harmonies.
The feel comes back on the title track, where the guitars and drums are held back for nearly two minutes. When they do come in, the drums are huge, blowing the song out to widescreen proportions. It's followed by "Hold Me Down", a song on overdrive for nearly all of its four and a half minutes, guitars jangling madly for a texture that nearly overflows with sound-- this is actually rare on the record, as most of the songs course between dynamic extremes of fullness and starkness.
"Lay Down Your Burden" is almost violent about dynamic shifts, sweeping away its quietest moments with drum rolls, sheets of reverb and luminous harmonies, as though the band is reaching for some goal miles overhead it knows it can't reach, but has to try for anyway. It's beautiful stuff. The Brother Kite's formula computes most incredibly on "Out of Sight", a song that teases you with unexpectedly dark chord changes the first few times you're sure it's going to explode, and just when you've accepted that it will stay subdued, it modulates and heads skyward of the backs of chiming, harmonized guitars. The vocal melody aches-- it's a pop song played as large as a pop song can sound.
It's not all as blissful as that, but Waiting for the Time to Be Right has more than enough wow moments to make it worth listening to over and over. "The sky's the limit" has been an outdated expression ever since Sputnik, and it's records like this that remind us that the cliché's obsolescence extends to music as well. The Brother Kite slip right past the sky on their guitars and into low orbit here, and it's a pleasure to join them there.
