Break All The Bones in Your Heart

Kevin Kenkel’s second album Break All the Bones in Your Heart comprises elegiac compositions for synthesizer and sampler, filled with pathos, heady atmospheres of longing and loneliness, unanswered calls, and missed connections. The album’s eleven tracks evoke the familiar sense of alienation experienced when the desire for human contact is mediated by apps and AI chatbots. Yet, at the album’s farthest end, it soundtracks dawn breaking over a far-away city, and to borrow one of Kenkel’s track titles, offers the tentative promise of “a different way to live.” Kenkel possesses the uncanny ability to give samples from TV news and movies an emotional charge. “Sleepwalker I” opens the album with a cacophonic spray of voices, akin to scanning across radio frequencies or distracted channel hopping. The voices are slowly drowned by rising sawtooth tones, quickly segueing into the dark and moody groove of “He Isn’t Thinking About You.” A brief minute of pulsing rhythm — its energy enervated, like an exhausted raver flagging on the dancefloor — collapses into an uneasy phone message, then the soft organ drone of “Sleepwalker II,” in which a man’s plaintive voice repeats a warning: don’t turn around.