Album Reviews

Formerly known as End Of A Year, Self Defense Family is not so much a band as a collective built around vocalist Patrick Kindlon. Just keeping up with the various names this collective hides behind or with the amount of people involved, is hard, but try pinning their music down! Take “Try Me” for example, an album that lingers somewhere between post-hardcore, art-rock and post-punk. Or as they describe it, “Built To Spill covering Killing Joke”.

Suffice to say that this is an album that defies categorization. For one, it’s 80 minutes long. Half of that is taken up by an interview with a former porn star (Angelique Bernstein/Jeanna Fine) and the rest boasts hypnotic rhythms, plenty of repetition and Kindlon’s trademark spoken word performance. Entire essays have already been written about this album, Google them if you want. Or better yet, just listen to the album yourself for free on Spotify (it’s actually been up since late November). I’ve sat through the entire thing a bunch of times now and honestly still can’t tell you whether I really like it or not or if it's part of an elaborate plan to see what they can get away with. It’s fascinating to say the least.