Premiere: Noble Kin vows to ‘Let the End Times Roll’ on new album

With another mass shooting ringing through the streets and ripping lives apart, it’s just another day in America. The vicious, pain-soaked cycle of violence plunges our culture further until a swirling mass of trauma, an all-consuming inferno of misery and hopelessness. It’s a wicked reality that wriggles its way into our spines and brains, numbing each of our senses but forging a dark cloud over our very way of life. Brooklyn singer-songwriter Keith Polasko hooks is pen into the belly of the beast, slicing open layers of such suffering and depression with startlingly vague-painted language and shape-shifting alt-rock and folk music. Polasko (known as Noble Kin) knits together cold, hard truths about the world on his new album, Let the End Times Roll, out tomorrow (November 9), on which he unboxes “dancing shapes viewed glowing back-lit through a microscope,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the record in-full today. “[The songs] present ordinary ideas out of context and leave them deliberately ambiguous, yet sharply-focused, magnified thousands of times to the point of abstraction.”

Even planted firmly in a bedrock of obscurity, heaving in between classic grooves and ’70s-style rhythms, the 10 songs speak directly to tangible, eerily-cemented and decayed concepts shocking our world in this moment. “There ain’t no rest for the dear departed / And I’m living proof / It was all the rage / But the heat of fireflies tends to meet with a short lived demise,” Polasko sings on “Short Lived Demise,” a blessedly funkadelic anthem bristled with ravenous guitar licks. He surmises the world as a cage, rattling with devastation, and humanity is left to fend for itself amidst volcanic mushroom clouds. “See You Soon,” a dreamy, Beatles-stained prayer, registers the aftermath of a late-night shooting, as he observes, “And all the masked men beg and swoon / To the long-legged beasts upstairs at the saloon / And like gypsy moths magnetized by the moon, I’ll see you soon.” The glowing contrasts of gloom and mounting ruin against lilting, heavenly production is most impressive, stamping his craft with an undeniable timelessness.

Polasko weaves in and out of the past (“Yesterdays Broadcast,” “Learned You How”), grasping at and wallowing in broken memories. “Lately, the dead of night is mostly reserved for raising ghostly spirits and depression,” he sings on”Bakelight Tombstones,” a spooky passage of time that haunts as a tortured spirit wrapped in chains. “Maybe, I should have listened more closely / The first time you told me…” The musician, who also runs a vintage record and book shop in the snaking woods buried deep in Connecticut, spools threads of downcast melodies with command, from the crash-landing of opener “Cure for These” to the ashy, but triumphant, “The Only One,” which bookends an uncanny resemblance to the collapse of the modern world. “Bad Graphics Blues” is an apocalyptic stunner, while “Dead End” slinks into a saucy, slick and bewitching cadence, allowing the storyteller to prance in and out of the shadows of guitar and arousing drum work.

Listen below:

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