DUCK CLUB PRESENTSKEVIN KRAUTER
with guests
Wednesday, June 10th
at NEUROLUX
$12 adv / $42 door
7:30pm doors / 8:30pm show
21+ (valid ID required)
In music, there’s often a tendency to focus on personal pain. It’s
a useful shorthand for understanding how an artist got to where they
are now, but sometimes that heaviness doesn’t leave enough room for
nuance and change. In his solo work, the Indiana musician Kevin
Krauter doesn’t flinch when staring down his past, but he doesn’t
get too obsessed with the dark stuff either.
In 2018, Krauter released Toss Up, a quiet album that was built on
intricate guitar riffs that looped back on themselves to create a
feeling of sunlit calm. Krauter’s sophomore follow up, Full Hand,
dives further into the world he’s created — one where songs are
evocative of late afternoon light, or dust settling on a creaky
floorboard, but with lyrics that probe Krauter’s personal life,
grappling with sexuality and religion, while exploring what it means
to grow up, grow more critical, and, in turn, more self-confident.
Across 12 tracks, Krauter tackles these emotional states and ideas
through elliptical songwriting that is at once poetic and truthful.
“A lot of the lyrics touch on how I was raised religiously, touch on
me understanding my sexuality more and more in recent years,”
Krauter says, “just growing up and becoming more confident in
myself...that process of looking inward and taking stock of myself.”
It’s not especially uncommon for artists to probe deep into their
own psyche to uncover what makes them tic, but Krauter’s light touch
feels like something all his own. On Full Hand’s first single,
“Pretty Boy,” he sings, “Look ahead, say I see me now / Smiling
at what used to stress me out / Cause it won’t be too long, but
I’ll take my time with it / It won’t be too long till I come back
home.” There’s a palpable sense of joy in Krauter’s acceptance
of dire, stressful moments, and a liberation that comes from hearing
him realize that the present will eventually be the past, and he’ll
be able to look back and find peace.
This sense of acceptance is the backbone of Full Hand, both musically
and lyrically. Krauter took stock of the different phases of his life
— what he was listening to, how he felt when he was a teenager —
and welcomed all of it into his music. This meant that nothing was
off-limits. All influences were fair game — from early-’00s emo to
late ’90s radio rock — and his entire history, instead of becoming
something to be ignored or pushed aside, became part of the patchwork
of his music. “It’s nice to recognize that the instinct is there
in me and all I have to do is say yes or no.”
Around the release of Toss Up, Krauter shed light on his dominant
artistic impulse toward overwhelmingly nice sounds that weave
throughout lyrical meditations on personal growth. His vocal lilt on
“Opportunity” is so warm, so effortlessly pretty, that you’ll
almost miss moments of harsh truth like “Wake up to a morning so
listless / come to, sun is looming in.” By the end of the song,
Krauter is alone, left behind, looking at his life and wondering what
he’s supposed to do next. “It’s an easy fallback to be
self-deprecating or defeatist in whatever I was I writing,” he says.
“It was a challenge to myself to see how I could flip it the other
way but also be real about it. I don’t want to make some sugary,
feelgood, all payoff thing because that’s not what my life is
like.”
And on Full Hand, he gets there. It’s an album that is a holistic
look at a human life in progress--personal flaws mean everything until
they suddenly don’t. Situations are terrible until a new perspective
is uncovered, and then they’re not. He’s not so much looking for
resolution as he is accepting the journey. On “Surprise,” that
journey is distilled into nearly four minutes of perfect pop that
manages to encompass the nuances of Krauter’s entire life. “It
explores anxieties I deal with and worries that I have. Areas in which
I feel inadequate or unfulfilled. It’s always a surprise to come to
a realization that it’s not as good as I thought it was,” he says
of the song. “And then having to jump back into...it doesn’t
matter. Life goes on.”
www.kevinkrauter.com
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FAQS
WHEN DOES THE FIRST BAND START PLAYING?
Typically the first band starts 1 hour after doors open.
ARE THERE ID REQUIREMENTS OR AN AGE LIMIT TO ENTER THE EVENT?
Yes, this is a 21+ venue. Valid ID required for entry.
WHERE CAN I CONTACT THE ORGANIZER WITH ANY QUESTIONS?
If you have any questions, please email info@theduckclub.com
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11/06/2020 Last update