Kite Operations

Kite Operations are a group of guys that love noisy, fuzzed out guitars. At first listen you think of Sonic Youth, and at times maybe Pavement. But those comparisons draw more on their earlier EPs. With their new songs to be released on their upcoming LP, the songs venture in a poppier approach that brings strong comparisons to a deep love of mine, The Boo Radleys. Just take the song “Traffic Lights” and you'll hear that guitar whistle in your ear. - Crashin' In

Kite Operations is a very loud emo/hard rock band, which had a rather impressive set of songs for that genre. Their two frontmen Joseph Kim and David Yang were really putting it all into their performance, so much that they actually bled from playing their guitars. The show was quite good, and with only a five song set managed to show quite a bit of variety and depth.
- The Justice

Hypothetical writers who sat in on a hypothetical undergraduate poetry workshop with a hypothetical Stephin Merritt might have been treated to a burgeoning lyrical delicacy like the work of Kite Operations' Joseph Kim and David Yang. After a bashful chuckle and a breathy "Two, three, four," the opening track to this yearling band's first self-released EP creeps in like a ghost's diary entry bent on getting itself read across the final flatline's great divide: "I always take the hard way / That's what I do / And I do it well."

But don't let the nearly whispered intro fool you. Despite the superficial similarities between "Taking the Hard Way" and last year's solo debut by Arab Strap's Malcolm Middleton, Kite Operations are more interested in the sincerity of intimacy than shopworn pop sardonica. In "Dronk", hints of Thom Yorke's knack for lustily dropping pitch in the final aching seconds of a long-held note drape across sparse, distant guitar and lightly idling drums. At the close, the distorted guitar and falsettos of "An Awkward Silence" belie the bare, scratching urgency from which the rest of Phase 1 derives its greatest power.
- Splendid

There is something to be said for a rock band that can go from a heavily guitar-oriented rock track 1 (Shiny Beast) with vocals blaring (perhaps even shouting?) to a more subdued track 2 (Vapid). That sets the tone for the 6-song EP from Kite Operations. Vapid definitely invoked the type of song that you can see the band perform on a stage in a huge rock festival setting with thousands and thousands of head-bobbing fans, especially when the guitar solo comes towards the end of the track. The band appears not beyond trying out different things as well. Check out track 5 (Anna Come Out) for an odd but effective chanting that has a sort of East Asian flare to it.

Favorite Picks: "Vapid" and "Titanium" - AArising