I Kill Giants “We Can Live in the Exact Same Place”
Confession: I always feel like such an outcast in the music scene. Aside from the bands that most “music people” gush over that I tend to not see the appeal of (And I’m not talking about pop here, I’m talking about bands that have influenced generations of bands to come and will still continue to influence bands after I’m dead and gone), I also typically end up forming my own thoughts in my head about what I think bands should sound like based upon their description to me and then when I actually hear them it is quite different.
I watched some documentary once that had this two second live clip of Fugazi in it, and up until that point in my life I had heard people talk about the band but never heard them. For some reason, that built them up in my mind as being something more spontaneous and random than what they actually sounded like when I explored further into their songs. To put it quite simply, I was expecting to be blown away by the music of Fugazi and instead I was actually rather bored by it. I know, I know, you can hate me for saying Fugazi is boring, but if only you knew some of the other bands I think are boring that you probably love.
If you’ve made it this far into the review, you’re probably wondering what most people who read my reviews probably tend to wonder: What on Earth does this have to do with anything? Quite simply, the last time I compared a band not to Fugazi but rather what I thought what Fugazi would sound like it was Gatsbys American Dream. I hear a bit of them in I Kill Giants. Just the spontaneity of it all. It’s the randomness wrapped up inside pure and basic structure.
So when I first went to listen to this album of eight songs, the first thing I noticed was that the longest song is just over a minute and the shortest is just under thirty seconds. I’m never one to judge time in songs because I also feel it so unnecessary to judge the length of, say, a musical review. If you can describe the sound of a band in thirty words or less, then awesome, do it. There’s no point in dragging a review out to five hundred words just to make the point that they sound like Flaming Lips. At the same time, if you can make your point in a song that lasts ten minutes or ten seconds, I don’t care, so long as it works. As much as people can argue about the shortness of these songs, I can just as easily refute them with songs that go on for over ten minutes (And that are nine minutes too long at that)
No, why I bring up the fact that the songs are short is because I was expecting this to be something either hardcore or punk, you know, very fast and heavy, to the point like 7 Seconds. While I would have no problem with that, these songs are not what I was expecting them to be like (Ahhhh, and the expectations point comes full circle!)
“Life Instead of Sleep” kicks off the album in a way that reminds me of Saves the Day, back when they were good, only with a bit more energy and vocals. If you can listen to this song and not sing along “Someday I’d like to fall asleep” at least once then something is wrong with you. We later explore the lyrical depths of this band with the line “I’m not all right, but that’s okay / I’ll be fine just not today”, which comes on the second track called “Sleep Instead of Life”. I see these first two tracks as being sort of bookends to each other where I really would find it odd to hear them play live any other way than back to back.
Also, by the second song we also get into more of an indie rock sound of something along the lines of The Canterbury Effect and The Casket Lottery.
The third song is where I get thrown for a loop, as it is more of a spoken word than anything else. There is a faint acoustic guitar strumming notes in the background, but the way the two singers both tell the story of “A Safe Return”, you can’t help but stopping whatever you’re doing and listening to what this band is doing exactly.
For the remaining five songs, the sort of style of the first two songs reappears and you get to hear an all around fun album. Look at it this way: If you feel this album is too short overall, you can just listen to it on repeat more times.
In the second to last song, “Thank You (Out Loud)”, they spell out the word special and that reminds me of Kane Hodder.
Ultimately, this band has many qualities in it that you find in other bands, but they’re all stirred together and come out sounding like something familiar but that you’ve never heard before at the same time. It’s really quite an accomplishment.
I stopped caring about band names years ago because unless you’re Hoobstank it doesn’t really matter what your band name is. That being said, I find the band name I Kill Giants to be appropriate here as I am a huge fan of the graphic novel of the same name. For those unfamiliar with the story, it’s about a young girl who claims to be a giant slayer whilst the rest of the world thinks she’s weird, crazy, annoying or whatever because, you know, they don’t believe that giants exist. In the end, the graphic novel has you suspend your disbelief in a very real way as you begin to believe that giants are in fact real. I feel that, much in the same way, after listening to “We Can Live in the Exact Same Place”, I Kill Giants (the band) could have you suspend your disbelief in a very real way and just become immersed in the music.
"We Can Live in the Exact Same Place" is available for free download by clicking HERE:
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