Just when you thought you’d gotten bored of simple little ditties made by college drop-outs, another one comes along and drops you deeper than ever before. Kenny Hamilton is the man behind Spacemonster, yet another one of the boomerang generation’s long list of underachievers turning to fuzzy self-taping pop songs as a form of release. Like all unpolished gems, the quality varies wildly from track to track, but the two consistent is the low hum of the cheap recording equipment and Kenny’s dedication to trying to make it sound as much like a faded 60’s single. You could argue that The Beatles cast a shadow over pretty much all commercial music, with their ridiculous legacy growing each year, but there’s a definite hint of the fab four in amongst all that haze, with sans-scouse vocals seemingly inspired by the two vocals who would turn most of Liverpool into a museum for a half decent pop band.
In terms of more contemporary comparisons, there’s a sort of Porcelain Raft thing going on elsewhere – obviously handmade, painstakingly, through experimentation and dancing with delay pedals, and you can’t fight the sense that this is a man encasing himself with his own walls of sound. e claims that he didn’t eat for two days before any of the debut release ‘Gills’ was recorded, something reflected in the kind of fragile, brittle quality of the songs – an endearing trait, especially given how much they’re straining to be expansive and solid structures of their own.
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