Review Summary: Down highways of violet, that angel awaits.
Kenny Boothby has been reckoning with himself on tape since he opened Little Kid’s debut full-length
Logic Songs with the sound of distant locomotive bells. Over delicately picked acoustic guitars, he attempted to come to terms with his lapsed Christianity through a cooing, nasal sigh, the growing skepticism toward his faith akin to the erosion of an entire world. With its exquisitely grainy lo-fi presentation, it felt less like an album and more a hastily recorded therapy session, Boothby exorcising parts of his formal self and sorting out his guilt, then picking up any semblance of who he was to carry with him into an unsure future. He has since expanded Little Kid’s sound to include
Glow Pt. 2 style fuzz-rock (sophomore album
River of Blood), jangly indie-pop (2017’s
Sun Milk), and soft-rock (2018’s
Might As Well With My Soul), all while never straying too far from his acoustic guitar-and-a-tape recorder beginnings. The searching, unsure qualities of his lyrics seemed to have bled into the music itself; the songwriting was consistently strong, but it felt restless, unanchored in its stylistic shifts.
Now solidified as a five-piece, Little Kid’s new album
Transfiguration Highway feels like the most assured statement that they have made since their debut, and if the recent rise in streaming numbers and high-profile website features are any indication, it’s poised to be the band’s overdue breakthrough. It doesn’t quite live up to its title: rather than a cataclysmic rebirth, it’s a hushed, comprehensive portrait of the sounds Boothby has touched on over the past decade. Little Kid reign in the teetering exploration of previous albums and play to their strengths by mostly leaning toward their folk/acoustic side, but with added electric instrumentation and heftier arrangements; it’s an excellent distillation of their best qualities, if not necessarily a bold step forward.
Boothby’s lyrics are as alluring as ever, starting with opener “I Thought You Had Been Raptured" which details a man coming home from work early to find his wife cheating on him, and his spiralling into a similar bitterness that Boothby wrestled with on early songs like “You Might Not Be Right” or “Logic Song/We Waited…”. He intersperses his gradual discovery of the “tangle of the flesh” with affirmations of his virtue (“And I don’t go in for drinking, [...] haven’t smoked since you got pregnant, babe”) and stoic religious imagery (they’re “intermeshing” under a crucifix, Jesus’ limbs “spreading out”) for an affecting portrait of shame, anger and confusion. “Close Enough for the Kill” features some of the album’s starkest lines: “I hope your God is merciful” he judges from distance before he mutters “it feels like cutting off the blood, you hold me down until we come”, the guilt born from the cross-section of religion and sex candidly rendered, a Boothby specialty. He often speaks to the spiritual problems that many people could relate to, but the way he zeroes in on painstaking details—peeling paint on a house, a hand tepidly placed on the small of someone’s back—can feel like an unexpected punch to the gut.
His melodies have yet to catch up. As conflicted and distressed as the words can be, he remains reserved and minimal as a singer. Since
Logic Songs, on which almost every song featured a simple descending pattern repeated throughout, Boothby’s vocal lines have had an unshakable first-draft quality about them.
Transfiguration Highway features the most melodically varied vocals Little Kid have offered up, which is not to say that they’re particularly exciting or memorable. They sometimes seem to operate as another instrument, more pleasant intonation than impassioned atonement. The singing can succumb to predictability as the album goes on, such as the title-track’s anemic vocals that blend into the music and never break out of their limited range, or the guitar lead which opens “Losing” being taken over by Boothby’s voice, then repeated with minimal variation until the song ends. Though its slightly alleviated on
Transfiguration, this tendency for innocuous vocal melodies still lingers, and some songs might require a few listens or more to really sink in.
This is all less of a problem due to the very enjoyable and assured instrumental work. “Thief on the Cross” is an immediate highlight with its looping banjo and warmly overdriven electric guitar, the easy-going verses serving as a feint for a delicately fraying chorus. “What’s In a Name” piles surging pianos on top of each other, building momentum under intimate, encompassing vocals. “All Night (Golden Ring)” approximates about half of Neil Young’s
After the Gold Rush in four minutes, its cloudwatching pace, lurching piano and lonesome vocal trade-offs between Boothby and Megan Lunn painting a desolate, romantic picture of love gone away. Lunn sings lead on one of the album’s best tracks, the two-minute “Made for Each Other" where fingerpicked guitars writhe under a chiming piano before her reedy voice enters, assuaging the song into a beautifully uplifting chorus. The album’s cozy, autumnal production recalls folk records of the 60s and 70s, the frequent hard-panning reminiscent of early experiments with stereo mixing. It strikes a wonderful balance between the shrill tape hiss of yore and the clean, spacious presentation of previous album
Might As Well With My Soul.
Transfiguration Highway will likely earn Little Kid a plethora of new fans now that other Bandcamp artists like Alex G and Car Seat Headrest have gained widespread recognition and acclaim. Comparisons might also be inevitable, and in superficial ways they do share a similarity to those artists—whispered majesty, a knack for blown-out and hissing production, lyrics that attempt to sort out wrangled and difficult emotions. But it’s Boothby’s stories and voice that ultimately sets them apart. His songs are tiny windows into someone’s spiritual, romantic or personal anguish, told in fractured detail through a nasal sigh. With
Transfiguration Highway, Little Kid have released a compelling summation of their previous strengths, and even if it won’t be a revelation to its genre, it's another engrossing chapter of Boothby's growing pains.
