KLEENEX GIRL WONDER - Vana Mundi LP

Nicely priced. One copy only.

"We focus with such obsessed diligence on this single cut here because, for one, it’s nearly impossible to imagine a more epitomizing example of the sort of thing Kleenex Girl Wonder has so often brought to the table (before whisking the tablecloth out from under it with one quick snap of the wrist) for over twenty years now, and, for two, because “Ask Mountain,” pivotal and unforgiving, also makes the case (though, yeah, it perhaps hardly needs making) that there are few if any American voices in this so-called ‘rock’ gig better equipped or more willing to refract the sensory avalanche we all wake up to every morning than Graham Smith. While quite well-found on Vana Mundi‘s other nine offerings – among them the syncopated slipstream of “Greek Fire,” “Sound’s Good”‘s poignant snark that makes it sound half heartfelt ballad half shrugging polemic, the rousingly downtrodden “The Mesomorph” that somehow still sounds triumphant, “Sunday Night Fever” that would seem to insert an errant Family into the US indie scene of twenty eighteen – it’s on this six-and-a-half-minute monster of lashing sardonic wit and twisted angst that the hallmarks reign. A fevered-yet-measured barrage of verse-making that places it persuasively on a continuum with Ginsberg’s Howl and Dylans “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Ask Mountain,” by its end racing at a frantic heart attack pace amid a dancing buzzsaw chorus of precision guitar work, full of such tumult and grace, is as invincible and vulnerable as the artist that made it, and the chimera that it has captured, however briefly and regardless of how few may have the good fortune to hear it, ensures that both song and writer will endure." - Stereo Embers