Kids Near Water - Hey Zeus!
Reviewed by ryan
Minor Threat and Black Flag. Could there be set of more predictable influences for disciples of punk and hardcore? Either Kids Near Water don’t know or don’t care, but their first proper full-length, Hey Zeus!, is creatively bankrupt and finds commonality in all the predictable places. Kids Near Water, a four-piece outfit imported from the UK, walk the well trodden ground of D.C. hardcore while ineffectively tossing melodies and dynamics from the likes of the Get Up Kids into the impotent mix. Still, however, Hey Zeus! is an album that is musically taut and this quartet is technically talented, it’s just that it falls into a genre where so many other predictable albums fall: melodic-punk scrubbed to a radio-ready sheen. When the Kids unleash their brash and jagged musical side – such on the McLusky-like “And We Two Were Lost” – they sound like a band with a heart. Conversely, the rest of Hey Zeus! sounds like it runs on a pacemaker. [www.candlelightrecords.co.uk]