Kevin Devine - She Stayed As Steam EP
Kevin Devine
She Stayed As Steam EP
Kevin Devine provides a four-song spate of very passable holdover material with She Stayed As Steam, a new EP of B-sides and remixes. Though they're not as cool as his breathy, glitchy cover of Manchester Orchestra's "The Only One" from their split single issued earlier this year, they serve their purpose well enough.
Two B-sides from last year's career-best, Brother's Blood, open the EP. Admittedly, they probably would have been lesser songs on that album. Heck, there's even a moment during the title track's bridge where Devine seems to borrow from himself (specifically "Fever Moon," a late-entry whisper on Brother's Blood), but "She Stayed As Steam" is an otherwise painstakingly methodical grower with light dalliances of guitar chords that spruce up the atmosphere. It also transitions into a big animated strum with some fuzz per Devine's m.o.; it's a near-six-minute process overall, and an explosion of which that doesn't detonate as well as in, say, "Cotton Crush" or "Just Stay," but is pretty effective nonetheless. "Big Bad Man" is the other B-side, a quaint, twangy foot-tapper that's most compelling when one dismisses outside distractions and focuses on Devine's subtly varied vocal approach.
The two remixes are "Breathe, Breathe Deep" by Plosive and "Another Bag Of Bones" from Trevor Dowdy. Among other tastefully integrated, stuttering electronic tidbits, Plosive loops truncated snippets of the hooky acoustic strum, curt digital drumbeats and places that "underwater" effect on Devine's vocals occasionally. Dowdy thins out the haunting atmosphere of "Bag Of Bones" to screw with Devine's vocals a bit too much (hello, robot voice!), throwing in a couple breakbeats and livening up the percussion a little. They're relatively interesting reduxes, but replay value is questionable.
[In a reverse trend of buyer's bonus in the digital age, you get two more tracks on the physical record if you buy the 12-inch vinyl version: live radio sessions from Vienna of "Ballgame" (originally on 2003's Make The Clocks Move) and Devine's take on a "sequel" of Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel."]
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