Experimental, quirky, curious, eerie, and dark are only a few of the adjectives that can aptly sum up this delightfully questionable thirteen minutes of strange music.
Feedbag is the brainchild of Kiana Endres, a San Francisco native musician whose brand of music is so refreshingly unique and spontaneous that it sounds like so little that I’ve ever heard before. Getting inspiration from a wide spectrum of styles and colors, Feedbag describe themselves as black metal Cocteau Twins worship, and to do my duty is to call it for what it is, this statement is both deafeningly accurate, and a severe understatement to the one of a kind charm of the music.
Flesh Freaks is a cute EP that runs for a reasonable 13 minutes. Packed with fresh sounds with a cohesive horror theme running throughout and binding it all together. The Cocteau Twins influence peak at the very beginning, with the almost 40 seconds long Intro. This tiny instrumental features dense forests of reverb, and a thick, dizzying, chorused guitar that would sound perfectly at home anywhere on the Twins’ infamous Heaven or Las Vegas. Following that is the one-chord drone of the aptly named Blood. This horrifying cut is heavy. With alarming guitar strums, equally dark and desperate, the looming, deep bass and Kiana’s heartfelt delivery of ethereal vocals, Blood is a strange, eerie drone that would sound just right if it was composed by Angelo Badalamanti for his score for Twin Peaks. I don’t know what it is with twins today. Kiss Me is perhaps where Kiana’s vision as an artist shows the most, as it is a cover of an infamous Six Pence None The Richer song of the same name, and not knowing this beforehand, you would have the hardest time placing this cover. So different and unique, similar droning, reverbed vibes as the rest of the music make Kiss Me a melodic cut that’s equally dark, curious, and compelling as the rest of the songs in the tracklist.
The amazingly named You Think I Ain’t Worth a Goblin But I Feel Like a Million Ghosts is charmingly about a local San Francisco lake, and how dirty it used to be. Confusing and still dark, this piece has the same shrill, trebly sounds of forks on a chalkboard. Minimalistic in composition, this short piece has what can be described as a beat that holds the purposefully frail arrangement together. On Stagnant Pond sounds dramatic and end-of-days, with the lush, expansive choir chants and the decisive sounding bass line and trudging composition, which all makes sense when you know that it was inspired by Dungeons and Dragons.
Flesh Freaks is indeed freaky. Kiane Endres manages to craft, on GarageBand if I might add(and with reasonable help in the production department), a sublime, little collection of severely charismatic songs that ought to be remembered and celebrated. Natural, quirky, unfamiliar, challenging, but ultimately a lot of fun, Feedbag’s debut is a freaky cool one.
