KiN – These Bombs Were Made For Us
For the completists amongst you, keen to bolster your burgeoning 80s-influenced electro-pop collection, KiN makes for an interesting footnote. Hailing from Stockholm with her third album in tow, Sara Hedin presents a who’s who of credible Euro-pop, taking the oddball aesthetics of Vanessa Paradis, the glacial theatrics of Emilíana Torrini and cool Scandinavian synths before running the whole lot through with a branch of dream-pop not heard since Dubstar and St Etienne were last propping up the popular charts.
Yet, footnote she will remain because These Bombs Were Made For Us is too inconsistent to bother anyone save the genre obsessives. With breathy and girlish vocal, Ms Hedin flits between The Knife’s poppiest moments on ‘Papageno’, Polly Scattergood’s sense of the mildly macabre on the gently overdubbed ‘Blackbird’ and the soppy drippishness of Alisha’s Attic with alarming regularity toward the album’s conclusion.
Nevertheless, and whilst not quite as explosive as KiN would have you believe, These Bombs … does house some choice moments. The wide-eyed and sultry ‘Cocoon People’ is embarrassingly alluring for example, its playful keyboards less than coquettish against the seductive dub.
Just as a warming Snaps is pleasantly blurring, so is it overly sweet, and despite occasional and reckless urges to the hit the bottle with gusto, you’ll know in the cold morning light to leave that sort of thing to the locals in future.