KILL YOURSELF – You Are Good / Fill The Sails 7" (Obscene Baby Auction)
Posted: March 18th, 2005, by Jon GoodwinThat’s Kill Yourself, the band famous for Not Sounding Like Shellac. Maybe in their formative years there was more than a little of the Albini stop start skrrng about them but they’ve long since beheaded THAT albatross, and pushed the envelope into a distorted postbox of maniacal screeching, off-kilter time signatures and evil bass riffs. I wonder if, at age 80, I’ll find myself humming more Kill Yourself songs than Shellac numbers, terrifying the ‘life’ out of the bed-wetting squares I’m sharing my twilight years with. Because these two songs are up there with the best, young man, mark my words.
‘You Are Good’ starts the OAParty of my future with its disjointed verse, tension-tastic middle bit and torso-bangingly euphoric chorus, and then before you know it its all falling apart again. Very, very good. But its ‘Fill The Sails’ which is the real killer no filler on this bit of (blue) wax. A toe-tappingly relentless repeato-riff underpins toe-curlingly creepy vocals, a genuinely unsettling ‘quiet bit’ genuinely unsettles me and it all comes to a head with a coda I can only describe as ‘punishing’. If this is still in my head at age 80 I’ll be a happy, if slightly deranged, old codger.
Jon Goodwin
Jon is a Leeds-based diskant agent, who aided his passing of our severely rigorous interview process by, essentially, having good taste and bigging up his time at 2004's All Tomorrow's Parties. Beyond this, we know little about him, but imagine that it's pretty likely that he has one of those friendly-sounding Leeds accents, and that he is good friends with David Gedge, Cud and Hood. And possibly my sister, who lives in Leeds right now.