Kyte - Kyte

The first track on Kyte’s eponymous album, ‘Planet’, harks right back to treading the gummed/crisp-packeted pavements somewhere in England, anywhere, really, the first time Bloc Party’s ‘I Still Remember’ came drifting from a nearby car radio. It sort of shattered into warmth as unexpectedly as the English spring, and, in some circles anyway, it felt wrong to like it so much. After being gunned down by the intense, shamanic math-rock of ‘The Prayer’ this was just… kind of lamely, shamefully sweet. But maybe those were just some very pretentious and cold-hearted circles.

The point being… it feels like Kyte picked up ‘I Still Remember’ and unpacked it, separated it into all its gleaming metal parts. Laden everywhere are those petaline, delay-effect guitars, swathes of synth, and airy, earnest vocals - and, less tangibly, those sad yet hopeful chord progressions, the kind Sigur Rós just seem to stumble upon without needing to try. It borrows a lot from this gentler sex of post-rock, elementally, with songs like ‘Sunlight’ progressing through all the same check-points of glockenspiels, fluttering, Album Leaf-style drumlines, and slow, guiding piano. It builds, it builds, it effervesces, it spreads out, out of the atmosphere.

Oddly enough, this sort of grandiosity isn’t the impressive part. Any artist with a selection of effects pedals and a well-regulated supply of serotonin can do it now, this business of signposting the song’s imminent end in large LED lettering: Here It Comes! Shut Your Eyes, Hard, And Be Overcome! Yeah, yeah. The real secret is, if you listen hard on some of the tracks, there’s the tell-tale heart of a Yamaha keyboard beating all tinny and profane beneath all the soaring, hi-fi real stuff. The percussion on ‘Home’ is pure Voice 100: Drum Kit, it’s got to be.

It seems the way to make a song that’s truly moving is to keep all that floaty stuff, sure, but also to be grounded; the real romance of ‘I Still Remember’ was in our Kele’s affable accent, and his talk of teacher training days. Cult British cinema blossoms with blanched, drugged-out faces and milky London mornings. And Kyte, Leicestershirean, comprehending, remain strung to the earth (but only just) with that MIDI soul of theirs. Seems like they understand that, some days, there’s nothing more dramatic than that same grey pavement under cheap shoes and blue sky.