This week I listened to Everything is a Miracle Nothing is a Miracle Everything Is by Kickball. The YouTube algorithm works in mysterious ways. Most of the time it just delivers me junk or videos from people I already watch. But every so often, it delivers me a little gem. This is what happened several months ago, before I had even started my weekly albums, where I was recommended a video of this band I had never heard of before named Kickball playing at some French venue called Grrrnd Zero. I am intrigued by this, and as a lover of small, independent music I decide to listen. After about 10 minutes I am engrossed. They just hit a 4th song without stopping which I didn't even realize until I looked at the setlist with timestamps, I was under the impression this was 1, evolving song. Everything I had heard had these beautiful, sparse guitar lines that were juxtaposed with these intense drum beats and punchy baselines. The vocalist sang with such casualness, somehow out of time in a way that was in time. Boy could he scream, but he could also deliver such pretty melodies. I decide I must listen to their studio work before I finish all of this live show, so I promptly start looking into them and find their Bandcamp page which has a link to a now defunct website. Even looking at the website through the Wayback Machine when the band was still active shows a very sparse website. I try to find everything I can about this band, figuring out what all the members are doing now, reading anything I can online about them. Turns out, they were not the hugest of bands. I start to get a little sad and then slowly forget about the band until I start creating my list of albums for the weekly album reviews, as I got into a bit of an Emo/Emo-adjacent stretch in my list. It easily becomes one of my anticipated albums I want to listen to, as I remember how engrossed I was by their live show.
I bring all this up because I want you to feel the way I was when I was first discovering Kickball. I think that is an integral part of my listening experience was that week when all I had on my mind was Kickball. Finally listening to them gave me such a sense of release. This album is... amazing. These beautiful guitar melodies just sing in my ears when I listen to them. They are made even better since they sometimes have multiple guitar tracks so there are these pretty layers of guitars playing these very unique sounding guitar parts. The bass lays such a solid foundation for the drummer to just go wild sometimes, kind of Mike Kinsella in Cap'n Jazz-esque which I cannot complain about for I love drummers that play like that. Such a control over dynamics and having such a great sense of time and ability to throw in these crazy fills in the middle of a beat. As I mentioned earlier, the vocalist does such a fantastic job balancing his fantastic screams with his calm singing voice that is on the edge of talking. There is such a casualness in his delivery. The words that come out of his mouth are fantastic too, very abstract at times where honestly I'm not really sure what a lot of these songs are about. I remember in a comment on the Grrrnd Zero show that someone thought that there was an overarching story to the album. Now, I don't have the time to do a full analysis of the lyrics on this album (if you're interested in that let me know and I might just start working on one), but I think that goes to show how good the lyrics are that somebody could find something like that out of something so abstract. This album certainly makes me want to listen to all of Kickball's small discography. I'm doing my due diligence to spread the word of such a fantastic band, and honestly I would recommend you do the same. At the very least, give this amazing album a listen. 10/10 album
Link to album on Bandcamp
Link to Grrrnd Zero performance
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