Jez Burrows / Dept. of Enthusiasm

51. Desert Island Version
July 2nd, 2021

This Is The Kit - Keep Going (Desert Island Version)
(File under: music, horns)

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This Is The Kit’s Off Off Oddities is an EP of revisited songs from their 2020 record Off Off On, and its tracklist is littered with parenthetical names apparently engineered just for me: (Horns Version), (Lorenzo Saxophone Dub), (Desert Island Version).

If ‘Keep Going’ (the final track from Off Off On) was a modest and clear-eyed love song, its Oddities counterpart is a sundrunk romance, draped with cinematic strings and horns. It’s a rose-tinted recollection of the first song, all of its colours a little more saturated, all of its characters drawn a little more charitably.

I wasn’t surprised to find that musician Josh Kaufman was the producer behind both records, given that the man seems to be stalking me through some of my recent favourites: Cassandra Jenkins’ An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, The Hold Steady’s Open Door Policy, and Muzz’s Muzz. The siren song that will eventually run my ship aground will probably just be a horn section stood on a rock playing something sad and dreamy. A desert island for romantic idiots.

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