I Don’t Have To Explain Myself To You, Kissed By An Animal’s second, most steadfast album, is a love song from our present spirit to our past identity, telling us the wisdom: “Rise up for yourself”. Moving through tight, clean, hard-punk, masterly into acid surfer, vibrating-melodic power-metal, Kissed by An Animal is through and through a New York band with grit, love, and party turned to Maximum Krank.
Dima Drjuchin’s voice has never been cleaner, clearer and more true. A channeler of the highest order who is now channeling himself. Touching on the existential nature of living and growing older while existing in the body of your 20 year old self running through the streets of New York, invincible but not reckless. Past feeling like you don’t fit in, past finding your purpose, and entering the solid foundation of just being the most you you have ever been. And that you is ripping shreds and slapping grooves so that the world can witness and ascend together. As Dima says “Finding comfort in oneself without the need to explain yourself all the time”.
Tsugumi Takashi’s bass riffs are a gift of hot clean thickness, familiar in the way we are familiar with truth when we witness it. Together with drummer Jon F Daly, who exalts us by holding down the most solid, steady, deep and clean rips, and elevated with saccharin harmonies, melodies and overtones by Hiro, this powerful tetrad have gone past coming into their own and found something more.
Some of the songs are perfect for cruising sunsets. Some of these songs are perfect for being purposely lost at sea. And some of these songs are the soundtrack for the life you will have if you follow your heart to the path of ascension. The fresh excitement you feel listening to this album fills you with an optimistic hope that is not the naive hope of your youth but a new hope, a hope our disenchanted bodies long ago decided to dare not believe in. Kissed By An Animal sing a spell that allows you to remember:
“All time is mine. There is no yours, there is no mine. There is no space, there is no time.”
“The brooklyn band’s simultaneously thoughtful and party-friendly second full-length is both evidence of, and a tribute to, creativity and true originality and an invitation to be yourself” —Bands Do BK
