ISAAC KOREN
The Kin vocalist
www.thekin.tv

(Spring 2005) by George Dionne

Chances are you haven’t heard of The Kin yet. But right now, somewhere in New York City, they’re probably bringing the house down at a packed club show. Fronted by Australian brothers Isaac and Thorry Koren, The Kin have been criss-crossing the Northeast in support of their 2004 release The Tracing (read CD review). The group continued writing while on the road and soon realized they had a lot more material offer. The result is a three stage bootleg release entitled Red, Black, and White. Red is currently available with the latter two releases to follow shortly.

RIL: Isn’t this kind of early for a musician to be up?
IK: Actually, you caught me on holiday. I like to get up a little earlier when I’m in nature. I’m up state in a cabin writing music right now.

RIL: That sounds fun.
IK: It’s my favorite thing to do. My brother’s in Australia right now.

RIL: If I knew absolutely nothing about The Kin’s music, how would you describe it to me?
IK: I would say that it’s fiery melodic rock with a lot of story telling going on.

RIL: You’re now known as The Kin, but you used to be called The Harlequin, why did you change the name?
IK: We changed the name for a number of reasons. Australians like to shorten things. I think it just brings things closer. I mean, we call everyone mate and we like to get comfortable with it. So when rehearsals came around we’d be like, ‘we’re going to a Kin rehearsal’ instead of Harlequin. Also, we say ‘Harle’quin’ while Americans say ‘Harle’kin’, so we started catching on with that. We did get an email from a bunch of long-haired Canadians that were popular and signed to Sony back in the eighties that were called Harlequin. They were nice enough not to cease and desist us, but we felt it was time to move on with our nickname. Now were waiting for the call about The Kin (laughs).

RIL: You and your brother were both born and raised in Australia, why did you choose to come to the States to pursue your musical aspirations?
IK: For all of our lives we were listening to American music. When Thorry was ten and I was twelve we heard Nirvana for the first time and we were like, ‘wow, what is this?!’ We loved it. We both started to study jazz around that time too. We listened to Sinatra and Cole Porter and the like. That’s when we really started to sing together. We got into two different rock bands around that time. He came over to America to finish high school and I came over to finish college. It was like a flash in the pan decision to do it. We both had opportunities here to finish our musical schooling.

RIL: Is there not a big music scene in Australia?
IK: It’s a pub scene that was taken over by ‘pokies’ (slot machines). They fill half of all the music venues in Australia, so you basically competing with that. They make more money than the bands. You’re also competing with Western and European music. Like Canada, the government put a minimum of how many Australian songs can be played on the radio, so that’s good. Australian radio is not bad.

RIL: What’s the one thing you miss about Australia?
IK: I miss the beaches…the topless beaches (laughs). It gets you up in the morning. They’re topless at eight, eight-thirty.

RIL: Have you had the chance to play in Australia as The Kin?
IK: Not yet. We’ve just been focusing on the Northeast region of the United States right now. We’re going down to Miami at the end of this year. I heard that the Japanese have taken a liking to our music.

RIL: They’re rabid music fans over there.
IK: We’re very happy about that. We have this in joke between the band mates; our vision of success is sitting around a table in Japan eating sushi.

RIL: With the release of your first album Tracing there was some local radio airplay and songwriting nominations that followed. This question is so cliché, but what was it like hearing one of your songs on the radio for the first time?
IK: It was like the feeling you get when you win something from a cereal box (laughs). You know that feeling. You just feel lucky.

RIL: Your website refers to Tracing as an album before it’s time, what does that mean?
IK: We’re releasing three bootlegs this summer. They’re a better representation of how we sound live. We’ve gone from a softer, melodic, more of a pop thing to more of a rock thing. It’s hard to categorize it, but we’re more rock than we used to be. I guess what that quote meant was that we started with a more mature sound rather than a heavier sound.

RIL: While we’re on the subject, that’s exactly what I thought about the Tracing album. I thought it was a solid, mature, rock album. I was amazed that it was only your first release.
IK: It feels like our third album or something.

RIL: What is the atmosphere like at your live shows?
IK: The home crowd shows are a full to capacity with people that are really excited to be there. The show it self is intense and fiery. We’re all taken over by the music ourselves. Me and my brother trade off leads and stuff like that. We usually take the show to a peak, bring it back down, then bring it back up again. There’s a lot of dancing in the crowd as well. It’s just short of rock and roll belligerence. There’s just something ecstatic about it that’s not The Strokes. It’s something ecstatic that’s not drunken. I think that’s appreciated. I think that Thorry and I have something that a lot of others are missing, and that’s being really passionate about what we are doing. It’s just who we are.

RIL: Being brothers, do you guys disagree on anything?
IK: Oh yeah, definitely. That’s the beauty of the relationship. We’ve kind of fallen into our roles and sometimes we test those roles. We definitely disagree, but we’ve got good arbitration. It’s not the Gallagars.

RIL: Yeah, you don’t want to be like that, but then again it seems to work for them. You’re planning a three stage bootleg album release over the next few months called “Red, Black, and White”, what’s the story behind them?
IK: We’ve got so many songs right now and we didn’t want to do another LP. We just wanted to get out and make a basic version of what we think we should sound like. It started out as us just wanting to demo. We had no visions of releasing it. The first time we played it for some of our peers, they said that we should really put the music out. The red, black, and white are just are favorite colors. They’re ancient colors too. It’s like a series. The Red and the Black are going to be full band, and the White is going to be acoustic.

RIL: You only have one album out now, are these bootlegs going to contain the same songs?
IK: There’s nothing from the Tracing album on these release. It’s all unreleased material. I think that we’ve found a song that’s going to be on Black that we’re going to push. We hadn’t really found a song that stood out before, but I think this one is going to be it. It’s called “Go”. We’ve released it a little early on My Space if people want to sample it.

RIL: So Red and Black will have different songs from each other, and White will have acoustic versions of those songs.
IK: No. There will be no repeating songs. They’re all new and different songs. This is really just to test the songs and see how they stand up. Also, we just love releasing new material and we wanted to see how they would sound if we produced them ourselves.

RIL: How are these bootleg releases going to be made available?
IK: Red was released in May, and it’s on the listening station at Tower Records on Fourth (New York City). It’s the first independent, bootleg EP to be put on the listening station. It’s $5.95 and it looks like a mini vinyl. It’s available exclusively through Tower as far as retain is concerned, but you can get it online at iTunes, our website, and other third party sites.

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