The Kissaway Trail

They look like teenagers up there, under lights flickering too fast for music that reveals its multiple layers over minutes too many to be deemed immediate. Five Danes away from home, stood swaying above an audience bristling with industry-employed individuals, backs turned when focus becomes an absolute necessity. This is their first-ever London show. They look shy, reserved; their music is often anything but.

The Kissaway Trail are one of those bands that make both no and absolute sense, simultaneously; their arrangements echo any one of a million, give or take, other bands at any one second. In the space of only a song’s length this attendee and the friend beside him run through a plethora of similarly pleasing aural assailants: Biffy Clyro, Aloha, Last Days Of April, Fireside, Mercury Rev, Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade… the list is longer, but none of the aforementioned truly sticks. An echo is simply the slightest of stains after all, a remnant of a past event; these songs are rooted in the here and now, whatever the soil’s constituent minerals. Influences are just that, and this band are mixing them well without any derivativeness really shining through.

Upcoming Bella Union single ‘Smother + Evil = Hurt’ may be titled in pure Fall Out Boy fashion, but an emo collective this quintet certainly is not, at least not in the modern-day pigeonholing sense. The song is affectingly subtle, subtly moving, movingly slow-burning; it doesn’t bore its way into the listener’s skull but rocks upon its surface, gently, allowing a natural erosion to take place. A self-titled album is due through the label of Howling Bells and Explosions In The Sky in April; on the basis of this support-set performance (Aereogramme headline), it’ll be another feather in the cap of a label that continues to discover and nurture the finest independently-minded talents.

Don’t expect The Kissaway Trail to hide their faces away from onlookers for too long, as their mix of twinkling post-rock-isms and heartstring-tugging melancholy is sure to propel them into the public eye.

Listen to ‘Smother + Evil = Hurt’ at the band’s MySpace page, here; photograph by Morten Schärf