Ape Up! – Kemosabe

Ape Up! have traveled the underground for years, proudly self-releasing a pair of “all-demo” works featuring MS Paint-caliber presentation and living-room quality verite in recording. These hallmarks of the pre-Kemosabe career of Ape Up! tend to mar full-length efforts by young bands and this album is no exception, but it is a strong enough effort to hopefully earn this group a larger audience.

Driven by roaring vocals and steady, churning beats Kemosabe’s rhetorical ambitions take a few listening to appreciate, “1(800) WILD-DAD” a reflection on opportunities lost in youth, “No Troy” explaining simultaneously “We fuck and die” and “we fuckin’ die.” The album’s not in the habit of getting much more philosophical than that, and the occasional attempts to pull back on the instrumentation and dig deeper don’t quite pan out.

Production issues hold up the album at several key points – a jarring cut-off in the pre-titular track, “When I Was the Good Guy,” and other small dents in the consistency of the sound that prevents Kemosabefrom being the full work Ape Up! (probably) intended it to be. Then again, maybe the album’s cover design is an ode to the disjointed nature of some of the tracks. “Drainbow” is a curious synthetic pause – I don’t know Ape Up! well enough to guess how its loyal fans will deal with it, but surely it can be only regarded as so ill-fitting as to be wonderful.

Indeed, there’s no criticism of this album one couldn’t have labeled against Vivada-Vis! or Thalidomide Child, except perhaps that Ape Up! has had three years since their compilation to put this one together, while that time period would’ve put Tom Gabel or Mike Burkett back in middle school. Kemosabe is a solid effort imperfect in execution but rich in good intention.