Arms

Over the course of Kids Aflame you’ll find yourself
questioning whether or not this album truly is the handywork
of just one man. Apparently though, Todd Goldstein pieced
together this album over the course of a three-year period in
various apartments. He might not like to admit it, but for
much of this highly enjoyable record, the 26 year-old
Brooklynite sounds like he’s single-handedly trying to
construct a hybrid of the first Killers album and Interpol’s
back catalogue, particularly on tracks like ‘Shitty Little
Disco’ and ‘Whirring’. Goldstein does a great job of sounding
like a stadium-indie rock band on these sorts of tracks, but
there’s a bit of incongruity between these compositions and
more subdued, meandering efforts like ‘Construction’ and
‘Fall’, but the album’s sequencing accommodates both strands
of Goldstein’s writing, and he comes off as a more rounded
artist because of that. A promising debut, no doubt.