The Adventures of Kid Catastrophe

Article on Illinois’ new album, for Celeste Magazine (Mexico)
by Paul G. Maziar

It is indisputable that music is one of the only art forms which can truly be experienced both solitarily, and also in the festive, sometimes combustible community of others. One hears a tune and feels at once stricken with grief, while another remembers all the good things about an ex-lover; the place and time where nothing remained the same; it all continued to change and this was yet welcomed.

Throughout many changes one endures, one always has music and the happening involved with the experience of live music with close friends and strangers. A relatively unheard-of band called Illinois from Bucks County Pennsylvania is a band that creates music for the multitudes of dispositions and occasions. Recently, while listening to their new album The Adventures of Kid Catastrophe, I was reminded of the scrabbles and transformations in this life. Let me tell you what things moved from their periphery to my head.

I thought of dark basements of dirty New York clubs and cracked ceilings. How during my first Illinois gig, I thought: Christ! How is this band in a dirty New York club like this and not a big-time venue, and was elated that they weren’t. Like we were all let in on a secret. Arch singing his golden guts out into a telephone mic, while his band of lively smiling comrades punish the shit out of their instruments. Images of a slew of full ashtrays at dawn. Thoughts on paranoia and dissention with the Headphones on, bourbon-eyed and blue in a car on small-town midnight driveway—everyone else inside, and somebody somewhere gave into that keen necessity for momentary solitude. The party kept on: Nosebleeds and Blue Hands. One’s mind often wandered this way, any mention of Illinois. The songs of their EP, What the Hell do I know? recall the endless nights we’d forgotten, ready to lose control.

That old glorification of simple dirty floors covered with friends in dirtier conversation, brains ransacked in inebriation: anything to bring more perceptive, richer experience. Real life is just too goddamn dreary most times. Glorification in the way Woody Guthrie lamented but sang the Dustbowl Blues out of his past; it became a point of pride. Small places like Bucks County compel their broken children to great artistry and ought to be sealed in and disallowed to become their eventual urban sprawl.

The Adventures of Kid Catastrophe spins with a kind of Gemini duality, and great exchanges of values. One could weep straight through one’s pillow listening to songs like “Missing Piece”, or “Swimsuit”, while “Irish Whiskey” and “Old Saloon” bring back those party times, if a bit more clear-eyed and full of even more Soul than before. The band is releasing 6 months of EPs, each combined with a chapter of a short film detailing the adventures of this catastrophic anti-hero. The summation will be a full short film and enough songs to take one through a host of their own adventures.

With some twenty-odd songs pumping from my speakers, I sit listening to the wild tales of Kid Catastrophe, drunk on this band’s prolific and revelatory truckin’ through the ups and the downs.