4 out of 5

Label: Comedy Minus One

Produced by: Tim Green

I missed the relative rise to fame for Kinski during the early 00s, but I was guilty of doing what I often did with such acts at the time – filed them as a Sounds Like… and brushed ’em off. That era was the last gasp of physical media, and as we were transitioning into digital forefronts, the way groups / artists would filter through It Band status made it hard – at least for me, my delicate indie cred so sensitive to such Itness at the time – to parse what was “good” or not, and unfortunately, lots of good got swept up in Sounds Like piles. If I’m being more charitable to m’self, different veins of the kind of revival / stoner rock Kinski was peddling were rather multitudinous at that point.

But as the story has often gone, time passed, and then a label or producer I like works with band A, B, or C, and I have the opportunity to reassess my former quick assessments.

And I gotta tell ya (he says, many words into a purported review): my initial take on stoner psych rockers Kinski’s 2025 release, Stumbledown Terrace, was: wow, I guess they got old?

Beyond some Southern rock riffage on Experimental Hugs, with its flimsy, love-’em-and-leave-’em type lyrics, Stumbledown’s bundle of rock-pop instrumentals didn’t seem to offer much. Beyond some excellent, crunchy production from Tim Green, 5, 6 minute tunes would build up a head of steam and take it approximately nowhere, chugging along in a vaguely krautrock fashion – and here I note they worked with Trans Am’s Phil Manley a decade back; that band’s rockers are definitely a touchpoint on this release – and then just fading out. Epic buildups as on the opener, or the 8+ minute Slovenian Fighting Jacket would expand into their space rock tag a bit with some audience, but result in similarly stalled payoffs.

I did some aural browsing of their past releases, and damn, the Sabbath comparisons that used to come up make sense: the group just rips. But they did have a similar sense of composition – they really are just taking their time to get to a central melody, then playing that melody for a few minutes before bowing out – the volume just tended to make that less apparent.

But: I trust Comedy Minus One’s catalogue, beyond their historical associations with Kinksi (who toured with Silkworm); and I also trust… people. Reviews were positive. I’m obviously not gonna agree with every review, but I also didn’t read anything I unagreed with. So I went in for another spin.

And it landed.

And maybe Kinski has aged, but if anything, it brought wisdom: the decision to work with Green, and to pare the fuzz down to an indie rock buzz, fits for some calm that’s found its way into the band’s tunes. The Southern rocker isn’t an outlier, exactly, but its comparative silliness and throwback charms make a great centerpiece to hang the album on, with those spacerockers somewhat intros and outros – the former teaching us patience, and the latter revisiting that patience as a reward. All of the songs, excepting the humdrum conclusion – an unnecessary go at acoustics that doesn’t add any additional dimension to the disc – excel at something I think only this version of the band could do: make songs additive, and not all hands on from the get-go.

That aforementioned browsing introduced me to that version of the band, which liked to kick things off loud and furious, and then fuss with it as the tracks went along. Stumbledown instead almost always starts thing off simple, and then seems to keep things simple… until you realize you’re awash in guitars and kicking drums, and even then, there’s still generally another layer of intensity to kick it up to. I think this is why I missed it on my first go-around: there’s some trust required to accept that these straight-forward rockers are going to pay off.

Besides my mention of the last track, some other criticisms still stand: tracks tend to just hit a fade out; and there ultimately isn’t much to the music beyond good vibes. But once you give yourself over to the former – which will happen naturally given time, your head bobbing and toe tapping – nothing else much matters.