The Paper Chase
Hide the Kitchen Knives
Beatville
Hide the Kitchen Knives is the beautiful and brutal post-everything second album from Denton, TX’s The Paper Chase, showcasing their madly inventive sound and captivating storytelling through 13 tracks of barely controlled psychosis and frantic outbursts. Like a Conor Oberst under the influence of The Wall, this is Wagnerian folk music, hip-hop driven emo, idiosyncratic post-hardcore – music that branches out in every possible direction and refuses to limit itself to redundant cliches and the safe confines of formulaic structures.
Somewhat reminiscent of Liars, The Paper Chase is still a creepier proposition altogether, much darker in tone and with a disturbing presence, both fatalistic and fundamentally cruel and frightened music. “A Little Place Called Trust” is a genuinely scary instrumental that offers one of the album’s most astounding moments. The opening “I Did a Terrible Thing” and the terrific “Don’t You Wish You Had Some More” are two other highlights on an album where there is no shortage of just that. The panoramic yet claustrophobic and nauseating “So, How Goes the Good Fight” is amazing, a frantic and charged track showcasing the band’s possessed and insistent storytelling through music and words. The Paper Chase has made an album of literate and frantic, overwhelming and intense music, one that sees them surpassing their own stunning debut from two years back and take their music and their entire vision to the next level.
Beatville Records: http://www.beatville.com
