Fall in Love Not in Line

Kids on a Crime Scenes second album, Fall in Love Not in Line, flashes past in a blur of high-speed tempos, gnarly chainsaw guitars, Brill Building sweet melodies, and yearning vocals. The trio set the bar very high with their debut record on Slumberland Records, 2011s We Love You So Bad, and the handful of singles that followed in its wake, and a decade later they clear it without breaking a sweat. Pairing industrial-strength noise with insanely hummable hooks is nothing new; neither is drowning everything in a bathtubs worth of reverb. The Kids -- bassist/vocalist Mario Hernandez, guitarist Bill Evans and drummer Becky Barron -- make it sound like a brand-new idea that just came to them after listening to the Crystals and the Velvet Underground back to back. The trio plays and sings with wide-eyed innocence and tender fierceness, blasting past any charges of been there, done that without a second glance. Kicking off with the breathless "Karl Kardel Building," which pairs chiming 12-string guitar with downright rude-sounding fuzz bass, then tops it off with lovely girl group-adjacent vocals, the record crashes through chugging lo-fi bubblegum on "Vital Points," desperate drama punk on "All Things Fade," stop-start jittery power pop on "Steve, Why Are You Such a Liar?," and prettily downbeat bummer pop on "Were So Good." All of it is delivered with panache and precision, each song sounding like it could be a stand-alone single. They do fit together perfectly into a unified listening experience as well, the kind where once the last note fades out, flipping back over to start at the beginning feels like a brilliant idea. The band took their sweet time making album number two, and the wait, while painful to those who fell under the spell of their debut, is well worth it. Not only are they proud torch carriers for noise-damaged indie pop, not only are they fine exemplars of Slumberland sound through the years from Black Tambourine to Henrys Dress to Veronica Falls, with this album theyve come up with something that should stand the test of time as well as anything those bands did. ~ Tim Sendra