Kandi Coded
Fell For the Gift
Rating: 1.5/5.0
Label: Volcom Entertainment
Kandi Coded is the hard-hitting pet band of erstwhile Volcom-sponsored snowboarder Jamie Lynn and Seattle recording legend Jack Endino; based upon this simple statement, I’d wager that any reader could safely assume what their speakers would sound like during a spin of Kandi Coded’s second LP, Fell For the Gift. If not, suffice it to say that Fell For the Gift stands as a high-volume, generic summation of what the musical form of ‘grunge’ was- and if they had their way, is. Though, grunge wasn’t as easily identifiable as some of rock’s previous detours; grunge is defined perhaps like the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined obscenity- those of us who grew up in the ’90s just know it when we hear it.
Since I dropped the ‘g’ word, I should need to address the Big Three of Seattle’s mainstream explosion; though lumped into grunge via fashion sense or geography, Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam just don’t fit the bill for me when defining the sound. Kurt Cobain’s melodic songwriting chops were too good, Soundgarden got more varied and complex in terms of arranging and atmospherics as they grew up and Pearl Jam always struck me as a much more po-faced, puritanical and rootsier version of the pop metal whose heart Cobain supposedly drove a stake through. The term grunge was a generic one, and for me, it always defined an untold number of generic bands whose generic music combined Tony Iommi’s monolithic Tubescreaming with the no-brainer rhythmic playing of Greg Ginn.
As producer of the very earliest Sub Pop recordings (Soundgarden’s Screaming Life EP and Nirvana’s Bleach being the most famous), Endino is arguably the architect of grunge and his longstanding disregard for studio trickery is evident on Fell For the Gift. Each instrument and Lynn’s voice are presented loud, no doubt, not presented as anything other than what they would sound like live. Both Lynn and Endino’s guitars are walls of sound- other than the occasional fluid-wah solo, the heavy-handed Johnny Graziadei keeps songs idling with his drums and, somewhere in between, Sam MacDonald’s bass drubs down hard on the listener. That said, for as mean as this band wants to be (and as x-treme as they have to be, with a snowboarding singer) there’s a kind of cleanness to the recording; it’s an oxymoronic sense of careful sonic detail paid to essentially ugly music that every metalhead over 40 seems to crave, Lemmy aside.
The age of those involved, too, puts a burden upon the listener to accept lines such as “Starin’ at me over my fence/ Ain’t you got no goddamn sense/ You better keep your distance/ Loaded gun’s always cocked, my friend” and as the songs are so generic, their lyrics pale in comparison to anything as interesting as Layne Staley’s addiction dirges, Chris Cornell’s brutal surrealism or Cobain’s strange sense of humor. Indeed, the best songs here are the Louder Than Love-esque instrumental title track and Johnny Cash’s “Drive On,” done here (perhaps unintentionally) with ’90s irreverence and a hope that the strength of the original will sell this reading. Fell For the Gift’s pleasures are thus few and far between, and any kicks it might provide were already delivered in spades 20 years ago.
by Chris Middleman
