“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…” – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Kilkenny Cats were one of many bands playing in the Athens, Georgia, scene in the 1980s. On October 6, Propeller Sound Recordings will re-release their 1986 LP, Hands Down. Mike Mills of REM was particularly fond of Kilkenny Cats and in a 1986 interview with Spin magazine about Athens music, said, “There are some great bands here. Number one: the Kilkenny Cats. They used to be non-melodic, drone, gloom-and-doom stuff. But they’ve grown as a band and as musicians and added a lot more melody to what they’ve been doing. Now they are a kind of a dark band, but pop.”
Several Kilkenny Cats videos have come out in advance of the hotly anticipated reissue and we present them here for your enjoyment:
First is “Burly Beast,” which the band described as “a high energy song that’s ultimately positive, about staring down the beast.”
Here is “Room 101” described by the band as, “an homage, or more accurately, a harrowing echo, of that nightmare chamber from George Orwell’s 1984. The plight of everyman, Winston…”
And here is “Thinking Fire,” described by the band as a “psychedelic moving graffiti mural.”
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