Review Summary: La Kolya
Kolya is at times reminiscent of an extremely prototyped La Dispute, with a greater amount of breeziness and spaciousness that pervades every not-so-chaotic but not-so-peaceful riff. It’s slam poetry with instruments to accentuate the rising tides of bitterness and ebb the flow as it somberly subsides, and in this I would say it veers closer to accomplishing its goal then it does to steering the emo vehicle off course and careening it into a canyon with the more disingenuous drama club kids (Hobo Johnson and the LoveMakers, etc.) This visceral if -slightly- overblown poetry vibe is at its most present on the opening track “Robots Dream in Black White” which greets one warmly with lovely, lush guitar work and bass/percussion that locks together with a surprising amount of groove for something so faint it’s as if it were all tied together by shoestrings.
Strangely, it is the vocals that are the identity and the dilemma that threaten to unspool those threads, but I will confess this may be a more personal affair than an issue of cohesion. During the more high-octane tracks (“Escape Artist”) they are biting, not quite harsh but with enough authentic desperation to hear them cracking at their own seams. In other times when melodrama and sadness is the motif (“Resuscitation”) the nasally whine is both befitting and bratty in such a way that it’s difficult for there not to be an unintentional tincture of humor to it (i.e the lines “Thinking of the largeness/The impending alien landing at your forehead” on “Somnambulation”). It’s hardly enough to tear down the quality of the tracks entirely (one cannot simply BEGIN to *** with those buttery smooth bass lines on “La Machine Este Morte”), but it’s enough to at least raise a brow at the authenticity of emotion that Kolya try to present.
Kolya is the image of autumnal leaves swirling with the morning dew fresh upon them. It is a small group of friends sitting ‘neath a maple tree in the school courtyard, jotting down stream of conscious confessionals for poetry club, fresh off the heels of short-lived relationships and making meaning (perhaps too much?) out of things so miniscule. It is the most dramatic bits of youth channeled into something that paints those insignificant pains into a canvas equal parts disheveled and mesmerizing, and in that it’s where the emotions conveyed, while sometimes running amiss, can also pierce with an icy spear through the heart of adolescence.
