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KINDNESS

GUARDIAN NEW BAND OF THE DAY -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/16/new-band-kindness?INTCMP=SRCH

Hometown: Hackney and Kreuzberg.

The lineup: Adam Bainbridge (vocals, music).

The background: It's funk, Jim, but not as we know it; not as we've ever known it over here, anyway. Kindness is the recording and performing alias of a chap called Adam Bainbridge, who divides his time between London and Berlin. With a surname like that we're guessing he's a Brit, which would make him the first UK practitioner of that form of enervated, etiolated, sampladelic no-fi electro-funk pop that we've been raving about round these parts of late, made by Americans in their bedrooms with names like Washed Out, Memory Tapes and Toro Y Moi.

Not sure about the latter, but name-wise Washed Out and Memory Tapes conjure up the right feel for what they – and Kindness – do: the sound they make is like a slowly fading reminiscence of the night(club) before; dance music recollected in tranquility, or funk that haunts after the fact. Gabriel, one of the songs on the Kindness MySpace, has the dubby, eerie quality of Byrne and Eno in the Bush of Ghosts. Gee Up, the "B-side" or whatever you call extra tracks on a single these days, is a cruelly truncated snippet, at 1:45, of luscious late-70s disco revisited. Complete with faux vinyl crackles and slap bass, it recalls 2008 NYC faves Hercules and Love Affair, i.e. it sounds as though it was performed in a semi-trance.

You would never guess, but the "A-side" of the single is a cover of 80s ramshackle bar-band the Replacements' Swingin' Time. You would never guess because Kindness make it sound like Road to Nowhere by Talking Heads. But that's not the only strange transmutation effected by Bainbridge: he has recorded cover versions of Somewhere from the musical West Side Story and Anyone Can Fall in Love, aka the Eastenders theme, and they are both given the spectral funk treatment. Being a perverse bugger, he's also gone the other way: he's taken Supernature, Cerrone's 1977 disco classic, and turned it into 11 minutes of krautrock strangeness and charm. Meanwhile, Neil Young's Tell Me Why and the Byrds' I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better become, in Kindness' hands, works of Fleet Foxily hymnal beauty.

Kindness have thus far only done two gigs, one for a London squat eviction party and the other in Berlin's trendy Kreuzberg venue, West Germany. Bainbridge handles all the artwork and has a clear vision of what Kindness all means. Not that he's overly keen to communicate it to anyone. Apparently he doesn't want to do any press, and in the makeshift video for Gee Up, surrounded by three anonymous bearded jazz-funk musos on guitar, bass and drums, Bainbridge – presuming that it's him – sings and plays rhythm guitar, a US flag draped over his shoulders and his face covered by a long, lank curtain of grunge-boy hair. Still, who cares about the cult of personality when the music and the ideas are this good.

The buzz: "Kindness sound like a budget LCD Soundsystem, without the vibrant and often shambolic vocals of James Murphy."

The truth: Yup: think Chic's Dance, Dance, Dance warped by DFA for the fast songs and Ariel Pink jamming with Fleet Foxes for the slow ones.

Most likely to: Host a swingin' party.

Least likely to: Smile as it happens.

What to buy: Debut single Swingin' Party is out now on Moshi Moshi.

File next to: Ariel Pink, Hercules and Love Affair, Bertie Blackman, David Byrne.

Links: http://www.myspace.com/kindnesses

Monday's new band: O'Spada.

KINDNESS

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£6 adv from http://wwwticketline.co.uk, http://www.seetickets.com and Piccadilly Records