Light and emotional simplicity is spread throughout this disc. It’s minimalism is beautifully intimate and can lead you down lanes paved with sentimentality and frivolity. This is technically not lo-fi but wallows in humility nonetheless. These are qualities that I believe in strongly. Sometimes comparisons to Sebadoh are inevitable but let’s not get bogged down with that image for to long. KOLS has legs of it’s own and stands on them just fine. Good stuff for the self-possessed loser.

review in Speck Zine #5, by Bleek
Box 556, Merritt BC V1K 1B8 Canada.
bleek0@yahoo.com

A few more steps in the direction of silence get us to Kind of Like Spitting, a Portland, Oregon one-man-band augmented, for this first full-length, by a drummer and a violinist. Hushed and tentative, torn between singer/songwriter poise and low-fi bedroom-pop naïveté, this is the sort of record I fear only properly appreciate once you've heard so much noncommercial music that you no longer think of polish and technique as qualities every record is measured on, but rather as optional elements on the order of mandolins or Chinese gongs, things that might be delightful touches in any given performance but whose "absence" it's barely sensible to discuss, let alone consider a flaw.

Given the hand-made booklet, the illegible cartoon that printed under the opaque CD tray, and the relief lettering on the CD itself, which appears to have been done with Liquid Paper, the level of conventionally musical competence on the record is actually higher than I expected. Kind of Like Spitting is, in fact, almost exactly what I thought Elliott Smith would sound like, before I heard him, and what I still more or less wish he sounded like now that I have. Smith vexes me, as there are clearly grounds for claiming that he's a songwriter on par with Paul Simon, but if somebody Simon's age performed a song as listlessly as it feels to me that Smith performs his, we'd be scrambling for a doctor's phone number to ask about stroke symptoms. The more quietly Elliott sings, the further away he seems to me to fade. The more quietly Ben sings here, on the other hand, the more intimately I feel connected. The litany of imminent losses in "Who Cares How Much" is delivered in so close to a whisper that I imagine the tape recorder propped on the end of the bed, in danger of being kicked off if the subject of the song stirs in her sleep. "Catch the Red-Eye Out of Girlfriend Land" is as close as I've heard a song come to capturing the queasy mood of middle-of-the-night departure. "Your Favorite Actor" makes Patty Larkin's "Red Accordion" seem overblown, but the sketchy guitar and handful of violin notes imply an entire lullaby. "We Got as Far as Minnesota" might sound like Guided by Voices if it were twenty times noisier and four times less coherent; "When they look at our dirty hands, / We get followed in supermarkets", Ben complains, unwilling to cloak his pathos in surrealism. At least a third of the melody of "Happy?" falls outside his vocal range, but you can't always count on knowing how to say the things you need to. The verses of "Maybe We Should Get Married..." ride on a single repeated chord, but in between the verse and the chorus is a picked guitar figure as elegant as it is understated. Loping drums give the disconsolate "A Thought From the Kitchen Floor" a faint country twinge. "Motor Boat" has some barely audible backing vocals that sound like they're coming from another room. "Please Don't Sweat the After Life" could be a blues song that has yet to suffer its first real hardship. "Why can't I slow down?", Ben asks in "Slow Me Down", a song already in danger of stopping altogether. "Something in the Air" approximates Tullycraft for a moment, but "A Song by Eric Mast" is back to gangly, muffled candor. Track fourteen, whose title is too long to quote, could be a tape of Mark Eitzel as a sixteen -year-old, "Staring at Your Toy Collection" Eitzel at nineteen or twenty, pre-alcohol. And the record ends with a cover of Karate's "New Hang Out Condition" so unresolved that I don't think it's a tribute, I just think Ben needed the for something and couldn't find his tape. Not even Robert Pollard writes songs that sound this much like recording them is a daily routine as uneventful as checking for mail, but as effortless as feeling lonely when there isn't any.

Review from The War Against Silence, issue 236, 8/5/99
by Glen McDonald
twasfeedback@furia.com

Willamette Week, vol. 26, issue 40, 8/9/2000
by Zach Dundas