New The Kerosene Hours track ‘Imperfect You’ sent a shiver up my spine when I first heard it. It’s a tuning fork stuck into the raw circuitry of music, this is song writing that delivers a shock to the system divine and unforgettable.
It starts off slow, but as it builds you have time to soak in the lyrics, narrative and word building of the song. In just five minutes an the corpse of a marriage is laid out on the table for us to feast upon. It’s nuanced, it’s beautiful, it’s grotesque, and it’s so very human.
While other songwriters are trying to put the world into neat boxes and explain their passions The Kerosene Hours‘ Aaron Silverstein is busy telling messy stories with far more skill. Not afraid to dive into the darker thoughts that plague our minds from time to time, it’s a song about how love can exist even within storms of heightened emotions and vicious tongues.
From the perspective of a writer or a poet, it’s clear that The Kerosene Hours has a lot to give, and we haven’t even spoken about its presentation yet.
Sonically it’s a trip. It’s static electricity that slowly tickles you to goosebumps. It begins with a deep and throaty vocal introduction before the pulsing guitar comes in accompanied by the horror movie synths at around the 50 second mark. From then on the song has a heartbeat, bloody and throbbing in the palm of its hand as it it dives deeper and deeper into the emotion of its story.
When the first chorus hits like a truck at around 1:42. It’s an explosion of the tracks energy and a cathartic release. It soars with a ethereal ghostly choir as the vocals of our narrator hit a particular tremolo and belt that feels filmic and timeless. It’s very Bryan Ferry, and we mean that as high high praise.
The second verse is much more powerful and frenzied that the first. It’s here we really dig around in the guts of this piece. The refrain of “I don’t like your mother, I don’t like your mother” is as clever narratively as it is emotionally delivered as a line you just can’t help but sing along with.
If we have to draw comparisons it reminds me of some of the Nick Cave at his best. It has the same cutting edge poignancy as the lyrics of Momus. It’s dark as the pitchest black but it has a dazzling diamond sparkling in the centre of it.
Check out this track and then go over to The Kerosene Hours bandcamp and show your support.
Words by Matt Miles
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