This song is a special one for me. I heard it during the Christmas season in 2011. They ended up on Reddit tagged as a holiday style tune. My first impression of them was of a jazzy holiday band. Then I looked at their discography and found The Moments in Between from their first album Rhythm, Chord & Melody. My impression changed immediately.
The weird thing is that when I heard Reign of Kindo I could tell they were educated. I didn’t know much about the people in the band, but I got the sense that they knew how to put together expensive chords and rhythms. What do you mean expensive chords!? Yah, I know right? It was a phrase my instructors used in university to depict chords with a lot of extensions. Big chords, lots of notes, very expensive.
Genre?
To me, the band exists between what I know as the progressive rock genre and jazz fusion. Both genres are hybrids that transcend the original genre. I see The Reign of Kindo as a hybrid of a hybrid. I am not sure what else you could call it. It doesn’t matter because I am not a fan of genre tags. In fact, most genre tags don’t make sense. I still don’t get what post-rock means. Is it rock music about the mail system? Just kidding. You could say the band plays highly educated popular music. Because they do have a large fan base, and it sure is popular according to their fans.
The Moments in Between follows a standard form. It has a verse that builds up to the chorus and undergoes development and comes back to the main hooks of the song.
The highlight of the song is the payoff of the chorus… that is the hook. It absolutely kills. Check it out.
The Moments in Between by Reign of Kindo
When I first heard this I sat at my desk holding my head in my hand thinking oh… my… god… How do I top this? I had recently started jazz university and I was still with my band The Day He Quit. We were writing new songs, and I was scouting bands that could serve as inspiration for the music we were writing. When this song came into my life it made me step back and think man… we got to step our game up a bit.
There was a lot of coincidence with this song like the previous one in this article series. Funny how that works. We were writing a song that shared the same lyric “oh my god.” We used it in a much different way than The Moments in Between. Because we shared a similar lyric if felt like we were tapping into the same source of energy. It felt like we were on the right track, and we were.
Pay Day
This The Moments in Between is about the payoff from the chorus “Oh my god, what have I become.” The way the drums pick up and change is what caught me. It was such a stark change from the drum rhythm of the verse.
The verse is hard to explain. To me, it feels like some kind of triplet polyrhythm. Then it does a break. Big drums shots with the bass, then BAM! Straight rhythm with big accents for the chorus. Super awesome.
I love the singer’s vocal quality. His style and posture is fantastic. He isn’t doing extended techniques, and he pronounces every word with great clarity. Very clean. This is good singing.
More Bits
Something notable about the group is that they released an 8-bit version of their second album This Is What Happens called This Is Also What Happens. It is an instrumental remix of the album done with 8-bit synthesizers. It sounds like something you would hear in a Mega Man game on the Nintendo. I thought that was incredibly original at that time. Check that out too!
I hope you enjoy The Reign of Kindo. They are a great band, and they seem like there are not slowing down. They released an album Happy However After on Candyrat records in 2018, so we may see something new pretty soon.
You can get the album on Amazon through this associates link:
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