Imagine the Smiths on Ritalin. The Cinematics play peppy angst-filled post-punk pop—especially on “New Mexico.” They slow it down and gloom it out on “Love & Terror,” building the track around the guitar riff of “Personal Jesus.” The Glasgow band seem happy to reside sonically in that peculiar time period between the ’80s and ’90s. This fits my theory that many sounds of popular music tend to rotate on a twenty year cycle. It matters less when the music emerges; the quality of sound and song reign supreme and regardless of their influences, The Cinematics seem to be settling into their own space on this sophomore release.
The Killingtons
My friend Neal, an extreme-snowboarding pediatrician who also has a Ph.D. in Chemistry, is a big fan of The Killingtons. I can imagine him jumping off a helicopter somewhere in the Cascades or Rockies and carving heroically down the face of a mountain in order to set a broken bone or maybe perform a needed kidney transplant on a young child, who also happens to be snowboarding on the mountain, or maybe he’d just take some tissue samples so he could do some sciencey thing with them like look at them through a microscope. Whatever. Anyway, on his way down, Neal would surely listen to the steady adrenaline of “Weekend Drive” off The Killingtons’ California Life EP. Wait, in that case, maybe it should be Mammoth or Mt. Shasta…