Kitchen Cynics - Time Of Sands

Get Happy!! Records - LP

Germany, 1994

Indie Rock / Lo-Fi

A hundred and thirty releases listed on Discogs and only a handful of records, this tells you how much of a DIY hero Alan Davidson is. Releasing music under his Kitchen Cynics moniker since the mid-1980's, the soft-voiced Aberdeen singer sits somewhere between The Cleaners From Venus and the quiet pop experiments of Woo. Eventually compiled by The Trilogy Tapes a few years ago.

Originally released as a run of 50 tapes in 1991, Kitchen Cynics's Time Of Sands somehow received a vinyl treatment in 1994 by small indie German label Get Happy!! Records, who provided the German market with a few titles of indie, lo fi and industrial bands, including early Guided by Voices releases, stuck in between a series of German punk records I haven't listened to (or haven't plan to listen to). 

Guided by the soft voiced singer through opiate fumes of quiet indie psychedelism, we're vaguely losing our sense of time as we're going through 14 dilated pop numbers, not sure neither in which era we've landed, as songs like "Memories of You" or "Vodka, Sweat and Aniseed" evokes Lee Hazlewood- adjacent acid folk, while the mix of fuzzy guitars and clunky synths of “Daddy, Look That Man Is Dancing” evokes some late 20th Century Lower East Side basements or Massachusetts garages. Time Of Sands is a remarkably consistent LP, soft and abrasive like sand can be, and a great introduction to a black hole of an artist, a little-known Scottish cousin of Daniel Johnston. (VG+/VG+)