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Kinit Her, "Storm of Radiance"
This duo of Nathaniel Ritter and Troy Schafer have had their work branded as neofolk since their emergence in the middle part of the last decade, but closer scrutiny makes this an oversimplified label. While Kinit Her may work with instrumentation and esoteric imagery of a time long past, the way it is structured and presented is a different matter entirely, and manages to make them one of the few artists working within a nebulous genre that sound like something far more complex and nuanced than a tired, renaissance faire tribute band.
Originally issued as a CD last year, the Pesanta label has seen fit to present this album in a much more luxurious, gatefold double LP that is a better fit for the drama and complexity that is presented.Bookended by the two-part "Mosaic of the Hyacinths," the distinction from other artists is clear.While the acoustic guitar and bowed string trappings of folk music abound, as does the boisterous vocals that cut through the pastoral calm, everything is soon expanded by what sounds like a digitally processed horn and treated percussive throb, pushing the two pieces into a more disorienting, disjointed sound that ends up being more than a bit disturbing.
"On This Plane" is another example of where the familiar sounds and instrumentation are reassembled in an unlikely manner, with dissonant, painfully scraped strings and slow percussion paired together, with the duo’s dramatic vocals making this all the more powerful."(Song of) Our Wrongs" has the same qualities, with even more unpredictable arrangements and instrumentation added.The jagged, plucked strings and bells of the title song also stick a bit more to a more medieval sound, but with a more modern build and release of tension throughout.
While Kinit Her has their own distinct sound, there are moments that fall prey to some of the more off-putting elements of this type of music, albeit few and far between.The overly affected vocals of "As We Were" and "Sky's Not Dead" are not my favorite thing, not because they are poorly done, but it is just a style and a sound that has never resonated with me.That sense of high drama and bombast with the vocals and lyrics is spread throughout Storm of Radiance, but it mostly feels fitting elsewhere else: here it just stands out a bit too much for my liking.
With that being said, even those two songs have enough distinct compositional elements and arrangement to be enjoyable, and the remainder of the album actually benefits from that sound.For a style that is often too rooted in its own, intentionally Luddite conventions, Ritter and Schafer manage to work with those tropes but in a unique and singular framework.Rather than trite songs about runes and fairies and whatnot, their output is far more individualist and rich, transcending the boundaries of an otherwise insular genre and carving their own distinct, powerful niche of art.
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