Reign of Kindo

This Is What Happens

(CandyRat Records)

Progression can be a hard thing for some bands to achieve. Put out the same album twice and at very best you can only maintain your core audience. Put out something so drastically different and you alienate that audience. On their newest album, This Is What Happens, Buffalo’s own The Reign of Kindo have managed to construct a set of songs that is so stylistically theirs, yet also steps beyond their boundaries. Their fast-paced and intensely rhythmic indie jazz sound is still intact on This Is What Happens, but the emotionality and structure of the music has popped up a notch. Their progression is most obvious on the track “Bullets In The Air,” which displays the full gamut of sound and feeling that this band is capable of. The dissonance of the spidery guitar riffs by guitarist Mike Carroll and chaos of the sprawling drums of percussionist Steve Padin in the intro is instantly balanced in the verse by the pop sensibility of singer Joey Secchiaroli. Secchiaroli smoothly rockets his voice from a powerful and driving tone to a beautiful falsetto peak just before the song breaks down once again into a frantic jam full of trumpet flares and cymbal splashes analogous to a sped up version of the climax of Radiohead’s “The National Anthem.” The beauty of this set of tracks comes with the roller coaster ride it provides. Where “Bullets In The Air” is as frantic as the title would imply, “Symptoms Of A Stumbling” is as delicate as Kindo has ever gotten. Their uptempo jazz composition is still at work, but the precious melodies of pianist Kelly Sciandra, who left the band after the recording of this album, and the light shuffling of a shaker are all they need on this track, which resembles something like Sufjan Steven’s best work. Where the band really shines is somewhere in between the delicate and the chaotic though. The opening track of the album “Thrill Of The Fall” acts as the perfect summary of the rest of the album. They find time on this 4 minute track to travel through peaks and valleys, break down into an exploratory guitar jam and squeeze in some syncopated congas and bongos for the climax, while the pop vocals of Secchiaroli keeps the song grounded throughout. This Is What Happens is adventurous and mesmerizing, and it makes me proud to be from the same city as these guys.

Since the release of their last album, Rhythm Chord & Melody, the band has jumped ship from their former record label, 111 Records, to the Wisconsin based label CandyRat Records. What will await them after the release of This Is What Happens is unknown, but the band is preparing for a string of album release shows which will kick off in Buffalo on Saturday (July 31) at Mohawk Place.

—cory perla