While listening to “Hell” from German duo kamikaze, you’ll be forgiven if you blink and think you’ve been transported to the mid-1960s, when incense, peppermint, and everything groovy shimmered in the air. Sound was visible in those days, or so I’ve been told, with melodies built from such found and ephemeral things as flowers and clouds, and lyrics cribbed verbatim from the collective unconscious. Guitars glistened like dew. Vocals, too.
Call it gentle psychedelia and/or dream pop, with either/or driven by a zesty riot punk (aka riot grrrl) ethos and, here, imbued by a truth few appreciate: by owning our mistakes, both big and small, we make it difficult for others to use them against us. (Everyone errs, after all, but hidden miscues are a template of vanity, little else.) If it sounds like a treatise on empowerment, well, that’s because it is—but one underpinned by the gorgeous reverberations of chiming guitars. If you listen once, you’ll listen twice, thrice, and more.
Kamikaze, it should be noted, consists of Jessi (vocals, guitar) and Flo (guitar), neither of whom have formal music training. Since 2017, they’ve taught themselves as they’ve gone along, with that DIY mindset extending to every aspect of what they do, from recording with a four-track recorder to making music videos to booking their gigs. The results have been impressive, too: Two sold-out EPs, and support shows for such cool bands as the Exbats (2023) and Death Valley Girls (2024). “Hell” is a taste of their next EP, which is slated for release next year.
They remind me not just of the halcyon days of the sixties, but the nineties, too. Think Juliana Hatfield, Belly, and the other melodic artists and bands of that decade, including the Gin Blossoms. There’s a melancholic tinge to their musings.
To borrow a few couplets from a noted (dead, white, male) poet’s musings on the impermanent nature of perception, aka Wallace Stevens’ “Description Without Place”:
Thus the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the world for those
For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
It is a world of words to the end of it,
In which nothing solid is its solid self.
That applies to memories, music and more, as well, does it not? In essence, with songs, we embrace an intangible that, though we feel it, we cannot actually touch—and construct and reconstruct realities around and for it. In my case, that means oft-hyperbolic descriptions and lofty thoughts that sometimes decry logic. (As Juliana Hatfield sings in “This Lonely Love,” a key track from How to Walk Away, “I am only the song you sing.”) And, too, there’s this: If my interpretation of “Hell””—and Stevens’ poem, for that matter—is wrong, that’s okay. I own my mistakes. As Kamikaze sing, “My faults, on paper one by one/I won’t forget what I have done.”
The Old Grey Cat 