Political music is very hit or miss with me. When I can tell that it's sincere, and the band actually feels what they are playing, then, to me there's nothing quite as visceral and exciting. When it feels like the singer is just jumping on the bandwagon and complaining to show how "concerned" they are, I can't stand it. Recently most folk/americana acts have felt that way to me, they didn't want to incite any real change, they really just wanted to get attention, maybe it was because it was just so easy to join everyone else in hating George Bush, you always knew your band would agree with you. Don't get me wrong, I really like Bright Eyes (I figured I'd just get right out to saying what bands I was talking about) but it never felt real when Conor Oberst shouted "I'm wide awake, it's morning!", after listening I didn't feel like getting up and changing things, I just felt like a complacent middle class white-kid, content with sitting at a starbucks and complaining about how awful authority is.
Kittens Ablaze is not Bright Eyes, they didn't choose an easy time to criticize the government and it's leaders. Dissenters are no longer typified as anti-war protesters, people fighting passionately for a good moral cause as they were under Bush, instead they are seen as (often appropriately) nut-jobs and racists, people holding miss-spelled signs demanding the president's birth certificate. It's not easy to be political in a time like this, but Kittens Ablaze shrugs off any warning that they might have received and throw themselves right into the throng while still standing miles away from the Fox-News induced insanity.
Their music does not punch you in the face with knowledge like Rage Against the Machine, but it is just as passionate, possibly more so. The band is a six-piece Folk-Punk-Americana outfit from Brooklyn whose sound recalls a blend of Los Campesinos!, The Decemberists, and Bright Eyes. They've come to be known for their high-energy live performances, (they smashed a cello at SXSW last year), and the music to go with it.
If you aren't really down with politics at all it's okay, their music isn't all throwing stones at the windows of the establishment, they also deal with issues of morality and things of the like.
Sorry I spent most of this post knocking on Bright Eyes, I really do like their music.
anyway... check out the link below to hear something that's relatively unlike anything you've ever heard before.
KITTENS ABLAZE
