aaamusic | On 29, Apr 2012

By now, I’ll assume that everyone reading this is familiar with those portentous words Concept Album. Signalling the arrival of something either as grand as The Who’s Tommy and Green Day’s American Idiot or as much of a folly as Kiss’ Music from “The Elder”, Kill Krinkle Club have decided to go one further and create the Concept Band. The name stems from a fairy-tale character created by Justin Commins and Elina Bergman, the Irish and Swedish (respectively) duo that make up the band named Krinkle, who in Commins’ words, “is something of a fairytale character. A mental phantom that stops people from fulfilling their potential”. At this point I should make a point of stressing, right up front, that this is a very clever band we’re talking about here, they name drop David Lynch and Haruki Murakami (me neither) when talking about their live shows and describe their sound in a nutshell as “child-Japanese-electro-pop-with-Russian influences”, but this is not something that comes across in their music. Unlike many bands and artists I can mention, Kill Krinkle Club have not mixed up intelligence and pretension and for that I could praise them to high heavens, and the music is, if not entirely to my taste, easily as well written, thought out and executed as their image. This, considering just how well they’ve pulled off their persona, is very high praise indeed.
Crucially, for all the duos talk of high-brow influences for their music, they are aware of the power of a good hook more than anything else, and while they may not sound like the chart minded synth-pop en vogue at the moment, every track draws you in by creating an incredibly atmospheric world of its own. While the hook itself might not stick in your head until multiple listens later the track itself is so utterly unique one would want to hear it again and again. Then the tunes make themselves known, most effectively on album opener Butterfly, with a deceptive synth line that is as catchy as it is slightly unsettling. Commins and Bergman are both vocalists and their voices play off each other incredibly well, most notably on the impossibly intimate glitch-waltz of Handwritten Novel, but their experimentation is what really compels here. For what is nominally a synth-pop album, guitars are everywhere, not least on entirely instrumental closer Sleepy Song, which is just a Spanish Guitar and trumpet and one of the most mournful melodies heard all year.
In many ways this album is a victory before it’s even rated, Kill Krinkle Club could have been a nauseatingly pretentious concept but with great songs, talent, taste and a winning sense of eccentricity, the high-brow names dropped seem entirely justified, deserved even. Put simply, this is a band with shedloads of potential, this is not to say that the album itself isn’t great, but the promise of even more interesting things to come is what interests me even more.

★★★★★

Will Howard