Goodbye Private Life

Review

The Kiss-Offs are, at heart, a rocking, '60s garage-influenced Texan band whose dedication to thrashy rock is made appealing to indie pop audiences mainly through Casio-style keyboards and neatly paired male/female vocals. Goodbye Private Life, which culls a few tracks from the 7" Love's Evidence, treats this sound near-perfectly, alternating between thrashy moments that sometimes fail, but mostly don't, and almost Wolfie-like pop moments ("Mock St. Augustine") whose indie pop catchiness is impossible to resist. "Mock St. Augustine" actually contains the album's near-definitive high point: the male voice asks, "Give me one more chance," only to be chirpily interrupted by the female response, "And you'll f*ck up," a clever little call-and-response whose catchiness summarizes the happily jaded attitude that informs everything the band does. As unassuming and intentionally non-complex as this record is, there really is something vaguely brilliant about it.