Austinist CD Review: Capital Flight by The Interest Kills

Track seven, "Idealism for Cynics", is deliberately unassuming at the beginning: starting with a single guitarist strumming a simple melody, the rest of the band casually slip in a succession of accompanying layers, each building masterfully upon the previous until you're left with an instrumental tapestry that rocks for a full minute-forty five. And just as you're convinced that the track is intended as a purely instrumental exercise, everything cuts out save for the singular guitar, which - much like the heralds in Arthurian epics signaling the arrival of the king - focuses our attention on the spectacle to follow: the lead vocals kick in with an fiery desperation, lead singer Diego Garcia-Olano nearly screaming out a trenchant criticism of people inclined to self-defeating apathy: "your talk is cheap / our talk is cheap / but you've got style / you play real cool / we play it cool / cause for the while / your cultivated jadedness / it drives them wild". What follows is a synergistic romp through dancepunkrockland, a magical place that we're all too happy to explore with these boys at the helm.

The penultimate track, "Now That You're Old Enough", is our clear favorite and we think would have made for the perfect ending to this album. Starting with what calls to mind Spanish castanets echoing in an empty chamber, the band constructs a brilliant, touching, and profoundly introspective tale of venturing to exotic lands in search of some intangible, universal truth, which - as we ourselves have grudgingly come to acknowledge from our own fruitless searches - is a construct that only exists in the minds of philosophers and hopeless dreamers.

Despite the fatalistic undertones that often carry across much of Capital Flight, the album at times offers subtle hints that perhaps these guys aren't quite as disillusioned as they seem. One of the most telling moments is the last part of "Now That You're Old Enough", where D. Garcia-Olano sings, "what you see before you / is a choice you withdrew / when you chose to mind / and you've made us proud" What we see before us is a solid rock album by a talented young Austin band - one that portends a promising future for these lads. And that should make anyone proud.

Capital Flight won't be released until late September (our review copy is an unmastered version), but they'll be giving away free copies of a 3-song sampler featuring tracks off the upcoming album at their shows these next few weekends. The Interest Kills play Stubb's tomorrow night (August 13th) with Canoe and The Early Tapes, and next Saturday (August 20th) at Beerland with The Black, AM Syndicate, and Bring Back The Guns.