Kid Astray - Still Chasing Nothing
You will tell me if I mention the whole crumbling genre walls / blurring genre boundaries thing too often, won’t you? It’s just that while listening to Still Chasing Nothing, the new single from Norwegian six-piece Kid Astray, I noticed they were billed both as indie/pop and “indie pop”. Now, I’m an elderly gentleman who tries not to get all misty-eyed at thoughts of days gone by, but I do have on my desk a 5-CD compilation called Scared To Get Happy, from Cherry Red Records. Its subtitle is “a story of indie-pop 1980-1989”, and there’s nothing on it that sounds anything like Still Chasing Nothing. It’s more C86, early Primal Scream, The Loft.
In places Still Chasing Nothing sounds like a very different kind of music from the same era. Its big, bold shiny production and synth attacks will give you occasional flashbacks (if you can flash far enough back, that is) to around 30 years ago as your brain tries to figure out whether and where you’ve heard some of these moments before.
There’s no implied criticism here, in case you were wondering: Still Chasing Nothing has more than enough energy and hooks of its own, and is more than capable of skipping nimbly through the rubble of those old genre divisions; it’s fun with a capital everything.
Kid Astray’s debut album Home Before the Dark is out later this year on Cosmos