Review Summary: There's only so much time you can waste on me.
Born in 1996 from the Portland bedroom of singer/songwriter Ben Barnett, Kind of Like Spitting would unfurl itself in the form of acoustic demo recordings. With a single room mic picking up the static electricity of the room, Ben bled himself dry for all friends and family to witness. Though primarily a solo project, Ben's knack for emotional songwriting was enough to garner the interest of peers, and he seemingly had no problem recruiting help to flesh out his expressions. Songs like
Power Chords,
Winter, and
Lazer Diagram on the first ever KOLS demo cassette showcased a charming rag tag group of kids just trying to figure out how to play in unison. It was fun.
Over the next 4 years, Ben and his companions would rapidly improve their talent through the sheer force of his compulsive urge to create. Multiple splits, comp. contributions, an EP, and first official full length
You Secretly Want Me Dead (released in 1997) would see Ben take his ideas from noisy bedroom recordings to professional studio sessions. During this period he wrote and recorded quite a few versions of songs that would end up on the genre defining Y2K release
Nothing Makes Sense Without It.
Nothing Makes Sense Without It is emo in it's most raw, stripped down form. It's an album that requires a certain caliber of stability to indulge oneself in, for like a cursed mirror, any sense of uncertainty in the viewer would cause the reflection to shatter inward. And let's be honest - the mirror is always shattering. Over and over again. Shards of glass take shape of a crystalline heart pumping cold battery acid to your blue lips. It is almost impossible to remain composed in the wake of Ben's untuned and unfiltered cries as he recounts rejection and failed attempts to foster love for himself or others. Being diagnosed as bi-polar, any attempt Ben made for connection was inherently built on a foundation of sand. In the sixth track
Out of Harm's Way... Finally, he put's it bluntly;
"She hated that about me, that I could never be OK. When it broke us forever, it all resembled TV".
The lyrics on this album are almost embarrassing in their vulnerability, and Ben is fully self aware of how his internal strife affects the ones closest to him. He knows he's a vibe killer and he feels god damn awful about it, but he can't control it. In the song
1930 Oak 1995 he describes leaving his love interest at a house party upon the realization of how much happier she was around any one else but him. He walks home alone and sings
"Back in my bedroom, red lights flashed. It's the first time that I ate food just because I was sad". Ben doesn't waste time obscuring his feelings in metaphors, his straight forward honesty rushes forth like guts from the gaping wound of ritual disembowelment.
Musically speaking, this record blends the somber acoustic stylings of Elliot Smith with the sleepy heartbeat rhythm of Low's
I Could Live in Hope. Drums are sparse, but when the snare hits it feels like a hammer, painstakingly inserting the final nail into your soft tender skull. The full band experience really comes to life with the addition of poignant drawls from the violin. Tracks like
Birds of a Feather and
Dodge Dart really exemplify how far the musicianship has come since the early days of dusty 4 track recordings.
Dodge Dart in particular really kicks the energy up a notch and makes you wonder what a full length album would sound like if Kind of Like Spitting was a rambunctious skramz band. All of this is interwoven with sad, solo acoustic songs that sound like whispered voice notes from a wounded animal; shipped off in sea bound glass bottles with the hope that some day, just maybe, they will make you feel the same hurt. The result of this mixture is an album packed full of dynamic shades of red, black and blue, just like the scratched out pages of your highschool journal.
Nothing Makes Sense Without It is nothing short of a triumph given that it's over 20 years old and still contains one of the most profound transcriptions of sadness to ever be recorded. The scope of its sickeningly raw honesty and depressive instrumentation would go on to influence a generation of singer songwriters in the emo space; burning out on the bedroom floor to make sense of themselves.
