Cassette Reviews: The Kevin Costner Suicide Pact and Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk

Even though I unfortunately spend a lot of time listening to music on my computer—like right now, for writing this piece, because it’s convenient to store music on my computer—I still really do not like digital music. I much prefer to actually have something in my hand—a CD, LP, or even a cassette tape. When I’m serious enough about an album to go out and plunk down my money for it, I’d rather get something in return that isn’t a folder full of files that lives in the vast catacombs of my MacBook.

But sometimes, because I’m a white person with white person problems, and I also have first world problems as well, sometimes buying physical product turns into a big hassle; you can’t find the record you want in the record store, or you pre-order something online with the implication that it will arrive before or on the official release date…and then it doesn’t. And your little heart is crush, because certainly the music is going to sound different and not as good if you hear it the next day.

If you can believe it, 2 million cassette tapes were sold worldwide in 2012. “Big” name indie acts still put out limited edition cassettes of their albums, and then of course, there is the unground culture of small tape labels—one-person labels that put out albums exclusively in small batches of cassettes. There is even going to be a Cassette Store Day in September this year, which will certainly leave some hipsters scratching their well coiffed heads. But the rest of us…well, we know what’s up.

Where am I going with this?

So here’s the deal. I just procured two new cassette releases from the small label Fire Talk Records. The first tape is Tape Phase by the Denver-based experimental outfit The Kevin Costner Suicide Pact; the second being the brand new release, Think Tone, from bizarre post-punks Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk.

The BBDDM album was released on July 9^th, and I had pre-ordered the tape, with the hopes that, you know, it’d be in my sweaty hands on that day. Or before it. But it wasn’t. I got it on the 19^th. Sad trombone, yes I know. I was provided tracking information for my order, and it apparently missed the originating departure scan, so checking it every day was a rollercoaster of emotions, until I saw that it had arrived in Northfield and was out for delivery.

I had to mow the lawn today, which if you’ve read my review of the latest Fuck Buttons album; you know it’s one of my most favorite things to do. I trudged out to the yard with my Walkman and headphones, all ready to jam out to some great experimental loops courtesy of the KCSP. I start the tape up, and as the first piece “A1” starts playing, what do I hear?

I hear the familiar plopping sound that an Apple computer makes when you adjust the volume.

I also heard a lot of surface noise. And sure that’s expected—it’s a tape, and it’s a tape of tape loops. But between the excess noise and the real time volume adjustment from somebody’s Mac, I realized that this was just a really poorly dubbed cassette.

So the lack of quality, along with the edge-of-my-seat 10 day shipping adventure, has made my disposition on both of these releases a little sour, and it’s one of the occasions where I realize I could have just bought both of these albums from the iTunes store, or from the label’s Bandcamp page, and not had to deal with all of these terrible first world problems that come with buying cassettes in 2013.

Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of time not talking about the actual content of these cassettes.

Tape Phase is a three-track release—the first of which takes up the entire A side, the second piece taking up most of the B side, and then there is a brief epilogue. The loops created by The Kevin Costner Suicide Pact are based primarily around the acoustic guitar, and then it is run through various effects and pedals, building arrhythmic structures. The looping is not nearly as intricate as either that of William Basinksi, or the Tape Loop Orchestra, but it shows a lot of promise and both main pieces, whether it is intentional or not, show a heavy influence from both TLO and Basinksi. When you find a new/young act that mentions “tape loops” in their description, sometimes they don’t really mean that, but it’s comforting to know that KCSP actually deliver the goods.

Originally hailing from Kansas, now based out of New York (where all bands come from) Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk have an incredibly cumbersome name, as well as an incredibly tough to pin down sound. Their earlier material, dating back to 2007’s Jam Packed Full of Awesome, is relatively straightforward pop-post-punk.  Since then, the band hasn’t lost focus, but the easiest way to describe what they are doing now is making music without boundaries.

Think Tone is heavy on the atmosphere, something they started to incorporate regularly on their last full length LP, 2010’s Skeletor and Me, as was last year’s Soda EP.

BBDDM have a knack for crafting pieces that continue to build until things almost get out of hand. They’ve also turned their back to conventional songwriting—recognizable verse/chorus/verse structures, and instead have built somewhat lengthy pieces that meander, build, and are topped off with slightly ethereal wordless singing.

The band themselves seem to keep a sense of humor—look at their name; also, they wrote a song called “Jeremy Irons Couple Skate,” and then there are the titles on Think Tone—“What am I Doing With My Life?,” “Let’s Listen to Souvlaki and Make Out,” and “I’ve Been Thinking a Lot About The Universe.”

So while making an attempt to not take themselves too seriously, the can occasionally take themselves too seriously, like the six minutes of weird noises that make up “KGB,” and the haunting, dream pop theatrics of the album’s first single, “Saturday,” which is by far the most palatable song to a casual listen, as well as the song with the easiest to follow structure.

The deeper you get into the BBDDM canon, the more acquired of a taste they become. Think Tone is by no means a bad record. It’s a strange record that tests your patience. It’s definitely the kind of record you would check out once you get bored with all the hot indie buzz bands that Pitchfork is always fawning over—Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk are about as truly indie as it gets. I mean come on; this is a cassette I’m reviewing here.

Both Tape Phase and Think Tone are available now via Fire Talk Records.