Three Track Sampler Review

Another just in from Losingtoday.com... "It’s now becoming a tad ridiculous that each and every review we do that features a Kelman release or recording is blotted by our bewildered distress that no one has come seeking this lot. Their debut full length - the sweetly cracked and hurting ‘loneliness has kept us alive’ deservedly won plaudits aplenty from the more considered elements of the underground press while simultaneously finding itself bending the ear of the evening airwave torchbearers Messrs Stephens and Kennedy. Within that aching platter Kelman excelled in their ability to meter out in equal portions the sparse with the stately, the exquisite with the emotional and the sensitive with the scarred. Embracing the lost art of crafting indelibly beautiful scores that once peeled revealed a hurtfully bruised core, their sweet interpretation of the silken shade wearing 60’s styled sophisticated pop can be found lying between at an unspecified point between Lee Hazlewood and the Velvets, the sounds sparsely woven are principally soulful though shot through with a cripplingly repelling detachment that weaves with mercurial magnificence between the hopeful and hopeless. Looming large on the horizon Kelman’s second full length entitled ‘I felt my sad heart soar’ is in the can awaiting release, this teaser CD features three priceless cuts from those sessions including ’is this how it ends?’ (their last single) which for those of you who take note on such matters was put under the critical microscope at missive 127. Tragic, tormented and tantalising this trio offers a glimpse of the rich tapestry sewn by Kelman - the reference points undoubtedly indebted to the aforementioned Hazlewood and the Velvets with the added tilt of the Go Betweens and Tindersticks, while of today’s breed perhaps only Clientelle spin vaguely near to the opining orbit. As to the tracks on show, ‘I this how it ends?’ is a magnificently numbing tyrant of beautifully bruised bravado that stirs from a sparse detail to assume a crushed and hurtfully wounded clarity, stature and presence. Elegantly arresting ‘Commercial Road’ - delicately daubed with a beguiling pastoral hue this cutie is a hitherto more upbeat proposition that deliciously shimmers and caresses with the same spectral charm of classic era House of Love while the parting ’shut a final door’ which we do recall hearing in its rough cut stages a little while back - still sounds to us like something approaching unreal and magnificent as well as still recalling for the best part those much missed dudes the Flaming Stars. Like we said previously the masters of pain killer pop. A tormented treat."