High Come Down EP - Format: Vinyl - Stream
Release Date: Feb 2004
Kin's second release.
+ High Come Down - 4:31
+ Birthday (Manitoba mix) - 5:14
+ Under the Sun - 7:06
+ A Certain Association - 2:31
High Come Down captures the city’s excitement with those unhinged beats set against vulnerable vocals - a pained reflection of nightlife: going out alone, standing in a club, and crucially, heading home by yourself. Hesitant yet playful, the twinkling melodies capture the shimmer of the skyline, the dizzy bounce of clubs and nightlife’s cruel disappointment. Manitoba’s slippery remix builds around Birthday’s heartbreak lead. Full of fumbled bliss and itchy exuberance, his rich eclectic touch makes for a startling remake of their 2D classic. Under the Sun’s dreamy production expands their pallet, performed with treated guitars and a mini-moog this sets them in a new live direction, exploring a deeper, organic sound. Finally there’s A Certain Association - Curtain falls…. The room empties… and Matt Didemus’ production fades the lights with this ominous coda.
Lead Junior Boy Jeremy Greenspan again shares writing and production credits with Matt Didemus and Johnny Dark.
back sleeveselected press :
From de:bug
Killer-EP
5/5
From Boomkat - single of the week
It’s easy to forget (buried in the technology, the innovation and the image) that an unforgetable tune is really the hardest thing to come by in this deviant, experimental, musical world of ours. And yet here it is : the second release from the remarkable Junior Boys drops and another masterpiece introduces itself with not only the filthiest, deepest broken steppin’ fracture of beats you’ll hear for some time, but with a simply undeniably genius tune to boot. You know, one of those TUNE tunes that digs its claws deep into your pop mind and refuses to let go. So what do you make of the fact that the vocals are just as they are , no vocoders or digital effects – just a guy singing? Or that the melody could have come from any one of our electronic pop pioneers? Or that the production sounds like the most underground dubstep kids sharing the controls with Timbaland and Squarepusher? Check out “High Come Down” and let us know. As for us? We’ve been convinced of its genius for months. Manitoba joins in on the second act with a remix of the first EP’s fabulous title track “Birthday”, while the flipside epic “Under The Sun” takes you into warmer climes with a classic Cocteau Twins meets New Order soundpiece, and EP closer “A Certain Association” recalls Martin Gore or Eno at their most cinematic. Forget about the fashionistas and the trainspotters – this is what we got into music in the first place for : inspiration, good songs, good times. It’s all here kids. Killer.
From The Wire
Birthday the first 12" from Hamilton Ontario's Junior Boys sounded utterly unlike anything else in the pop spectrum, fusing falsetto crooning, delicate electropop arpeggios, and the wide open syncopations of US R&B and UK Grime; Fennesz's shoegazing remix made you wonder if there was any limit to the sounds they could call their own. On their second EP they expand their range yet again, essentially redefining in a single stroke the limits of electronic pop.
The title track takes off where 'Birthday' left off, smoothing over a stuttering, pothole-riddled beat with icy synthesizers and Jeremy Greenspan's bedroom croon. But the six minute epic 'Under The Sun' sounds like another group entirely, fusing a grinding electro disco groove with the sun-kissed harmonics if 4AD's Dif Juz. Deep in the mix, a sampled yelp punctuates every beat abd brooding chicken-scratch guitar carves a deep indelible funk, but it's the airy, billowing feedback that captures you. Taking yet another direction, Manitoba reprises 'Birthday' in his own fashion, pasting the original vocals over a scuffed beat battered with bells and scratched vinyl.
single of the issue in Absorb
following on from their astonishing debut ep 'birthday' in 2003 and as a taster for their forthcoming long playa 'last exit', canada's junior boys return with their unique take on modernism. the title track is simply masterful. the opposing forces of jeremy greenspan's fragile, encased-in-glass sweet nothings against the penetrating clipped breaks demonstrate to marvellous effect how friction can work within modern pop music.
the manitoba reworking of 'birthday' is understated and just gently bats the original around with delicate paws; the jittery movement between textures from one verse to the next are all underpinned by close-range sinewave melodies. 'under the sun' and the closing 'a certain association' are slightly more ambitious in their scope; imagine a steadicam nitedrive thru neon lit underpasses chasing distant taillights: the updated soundtrack to michael mann's 'thief'. suitably stirring.
from Seattle Weekly
[the title track is] the best thing the trio has done so far
from VICE
After Italo-disco, the latest hip retro genre to be pillaged is called Canadisco. all those killer exteneded dance 12-inches from the early 80s. Meantime, here's something fresh from canada: the second single from the Junior Boys, who are destined for great things this year. Anyone capable of creating 'Under the Sun', seven minutes of pulsing Balearic narco-pop deserves a plethora of accolades.from buzz magazine
The debut Junior Boys EP was one of those records that just got better each time you played it until it sounded like a different record altogether. High Come down sees these Canuck tinkers fleshing out their 80s pop angles, locking them to the established dub-house spine and delivering four more chillingly great tracks.
From world of stelfox
...title track is beautiful in a Scritti-meets-Japan-meets-Timbaland kinda way. With three more tracks, including a Manitoba remix of the previously released "Birthday", this is probably the best thing I've heard over the past couple of months.
From playlouder
'Tis the new wave of indie-dance in action, as, scarcely more visibly, is Junior Boys' 'High Come Down' EP on Kin, on which they've actually managed to include a Manitoba remix. Good effort! Although the tracks left to their own devices are better; the ultra-minimalist throbbing of 'A Certain Association' is spectacularly sinister, while 'Under The Sun' is a shiningly expansive, almost 80s-styled clatterer that, should the band ever get a more mainstream deal, really ought to re-emerge in its own right. Corking.
From tufluv
Seems to falter and crack; fragile like painted eggshells under barefoot. Greenspan sounds like a whiteboy trying to be Prince, but he doesn’t quite have the chops for those high notes so sounds adolescent, like Daryll Hall with a sore throat, yet no less assured – the cocky-vulnerable-geek-wannabe-playa, possibly sat in a white satin shirt sipping an icy drink. Beats stammer and stutter and fall and tumble like a child over obstacles, do a little spin, touch the ground, jump in the air and fall over again. Indigestive bass rumbles and belches, synths dribble down its front. Manitoba’s excellent remix of ‘Birthday’ introduces cowbells – not in he punk-funk sense but in the sense of bells that cows wear, or rather those of mountain goats being herded, adding a reinforced 4/4 that snaps hard on the off-beat snare, bass booming on the kick, a synth arpeggio rippling gently on the distance and melodies that warble quaintly to themselves, working brilliantly with Jeremy’s pretend-naïve, self-pitying vocal. The blue-eyed soul re-routes via Talk Talk’s lilting guitars for ‘Under The Sun’, which indeed sounds like a mid-summer LA heat haze, smog hanging still in the stifling breeze-less air, skin burning and cracking, the sea offering cool solace. There are just the slightest ghosts of Don Henley’s ‘Boys of Summer’, Chris Rea’s ‘On The Beach’ and any incidental music from Miami Vice (without sounding particularly like any); the melancholic nostalgia for lost summer days, radiating faint distant heat.
