Kinch Kinski’s third EP Rough Cuts from Sing Sing delivers four intense and passionate songs filled with big ideas, powerful emotions and great acoustic guitar playing.
Kinski moved to Melbourne several years ago from his home town of Armidale, New South Wales, which, given its size, seems to have an unusually high output of ridiculously talented people including Don Walker, Peter Allen, Jess Ribeiro and many others.
As for this release, you know things are going to get interesting when the opening line is “I hold my brother down while dad calls the cops”. Lead track ‘Waterfall’ describes the turmoil between a father and his sons who are emotionally lost to each other.
‘Porchlight (In mournful, twitching earth; her body lain)’ leads on to what feels like even darker territory, with a melancholy and memorable refrain and words that could be fragments from a Raymond Carver murder tale.
Things take a sudden turn with the frentically-paced ‘The Bosch Blues’ which piles together a bunch of German cultural, political and intellectual figures from the last 350 years and leaves them to sort out their contradictions.
‘Blues, Blues Everywhere But No One Left to Sing’ rounds out the EP, demonstrating Kinch’s very impressive dynamic range as a vocalist and fingerstyle guitarist.
No doubt we’ll be hearing a lot more from Kinch Kinski, but Rough Cuts from Sing Sing proves he’s an artist with an original and fearless vision.
