Those tuned into NYC's downtown thrash scene may know Jonny Ollsin from his time on guitar and vocals with breakneck metallers Children, but it's this familial project with vocalist/wife Kim Krans that's become the couple's primary focus on the heels of completing a chilly and beautiful debut album. A friend passed along a link to the Miller Park LP -- which, incidentally, is the full extent of the outreach machine in place, friends trading links -- and it comes at just the right time as thermometers dip and ears need a reset after the summer's fixation on beachy sun-stroked sounds. They've branded the music "heavy mellow," which is fair shorthand for the Family's fixation on folk-flecked tunes fronted by Kim's even-keeled ice queen vocalisms and wound into place by Jonny's dialed-down but inevitably metal-edged guitar lines. Married since 2006, Ollsin and Krans built a cabin the Catskills and recorded these songs there; airy and eerie, spacious and windswept, these tracks couldn't have been built elsewhere.We have two sides of the Family for you to sample: the deliberate, darkened moans of scene-setting album-opener "Hatred," and the pensive, exceedingly pretty finger-picked mountain folk of "Fantasy."
Family Band - "Fantasy" (MP3)
Family Band - "Hatred" (MP3)
Family Band's self-released Miller Park is due soon. In the meantime you can hear their debut EP here, and if you send them your mailing address they'll send you a copy ("it is rad and handmade to the bone"). Keep up with the fam at their site and blog.
