Engine Kid are one of those bands where, although I saw them once and have a couple of their records, I could never fully stand behind what they were doing... a bit too paint-by-numbers, which was my problem with a lot of the 90's post-hardcore bands, I guess. The "Heater Sweats Nails" 7-inch is pretty typical along those lines; while it's almost definitely my favorite thing of theirs (besides that one song on "Angel Wings" about sleeping in a car), the a-side is full-bore Unsane/Today is the Day without any new corners or angles to make things interesting, and the b-side sounds like a band that just heard "Spiderland" for the first time, a tag that these guys ran into a lot, apparently. Still, it's not a bad record overall, so maybe I should stop being a dick about it, plus I've got these neat photos. I guess someone-or-other from this band now plays in something-or-other, or something.
Engine Kid -
"Heater Sweats Nails"
"Husk"
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I always fail to pull the trigger on their subsequent, notoriously Slint-y LP. [A small but significant sub-section of my collection is devoted to "fake Slint" records.]
That the main guy in this band went on to start Southern Lord Records, release a bunch of "it" bands of the heavy variety, and then fuel the $37 LP trend is quite an upshot. Didn't Engine Kid do some sorta split with Silkworm, too? "Fleeting relevance" is this guy's middle name, although I guess Boris and their label are here to stay. And on REALLY BITCHIN' vinyl.
The "Angel Wings" album has one good song on it, it's worth it as a $1 CD purchase but that's about it.
Every time I get one of these old posts put in front of me again, it makes me chuckle at some of the stuff that I wrote (and then promptly forgot about). Especially the fact that nobody ever 'gets' it.
hi.
huge fan of ENGINE KID. slint was a complete snoozefest compared to the EK epic ANGEL WINGS. if EK's Greg Anderson was influenced by Slint he distilled out the best of what that mediocre outfit had to offer & blew doors on anything else that might have existed in the same realm of musical destruction. i hear as much black flag & pixies as i might hear Slint. i'm exhausted by the Slint comparison. i've tried to understand it & i just don't hear anything, but the quiet / loud dynamic similarities & every band under the sun experiments with that tool. i recently tried to find anything of value in Slint's Spiderland & turned it off after 3 songs.
i saw EK in Long Island, NY in 1993 & they put on one of the most memorable performances i've witnessed in my 26 years of going to see bands.
enjoy gang!
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