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Review: 'KYTE'
'DEAD WAVES'   

-  Label: 'THE KIDS LABEL'
-  Genre: 'Indie' -  Release Date: '19th April 2010'

Our Rating:
This writer had been hearing about how much potential home counties dream popsters KYTE had for some time before he finally caught them play a likeable, if slightly same-y set in support of Leeds' I Like Trains in Cork in the spring of 2008.

If I'm being frank, they were a bit too medium-paced and polite to really hit home, especially when followed by the visually-arresting ILT. However, they did have an indefinable something and their singer Nick Moon was a slightly disturbing presence, stabbing away at a laptop like it was about to bite and poison him terminally while he emoted.

Ultimately, I filed them away under 'promising, but some way to go' at the time. Well, in the two years since, they seem to have run a good bit of that distance, for their long-awaited (I think we can legitimately use that term here) début album 'Dead Waves' is a bloody huge record. Spacey, yes, but bloody huge in terms of expanse and scope.

Thus, in 2010, we can probably still refer to Kyte as a 'dream-pop' band, but one playing dream pop on steroids and 'Dead Waves'' opening track 'The Smoke Saves Lives' gives you some idea of the kind of ambition on display here. Built around a deceptively simple piano line, it goes from lush and gentle to full-on, planet-destroying anthemic pop at the drop of an asteroid and suggests that Kyte are on a mission to re-align the term 'epic'.

It's not the only tune to adopt such a galaxy-straddling stance, either. Tracks like the swirling, exhilarating 'Fear From Death' and the tremendous 'Each Life Critical' push for the stratosphere, while – whether they like it or not - the smouldering heaviosity of 'Designed for Damage' shoves them into the kind of gravitas-fuelled landscape U2 have inhabited so fearlessly for years.

Elsewhere, Kyte operate with one foot placed very firmly in the dance camp. Tracks like new single 'IHNFSA' – with its' electro-stomp beat and 'You're Alone Tonight' – with its' bleep-y, repetitive keyboard refrain – welcome Techno elements into the band's strategy, but in the way New Order always did, Kyte marry technology with a vulnerable, human element that ensures their music hits home on a universal scale. Nowhere is this more evident than on the great 'No-one is Angry, Just Afraid' where Moon asserts – with some accuracy – that “we're fighting to survive” while the band create their most moving celestial sweep of sound to complement it to perfection.

'Dead Waves', then, is a bold statement of intent. It's been a while coming, but its' depth and scope suggest Kyte have been diligently building this one until it passed their stringent standards. They've not only run that distance I spoke of, but they've gone the extra mile here. And even if this disposable world, such commitment still makes all the difference.





The Kids Label official website
  author: Tim Peacock

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KYTE - DEAD WAVES