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ARMS
Kids Aflame

"A wild and refreshingly noisy ride." –NME

"ARMS’ music is lo-fi but lovely and very, very good. There's truly not a bad song on here. Kids Aflame rocks, shudders, weeps, and smiles as you reach to hit 'play' again." --The Guardian (UK)

"A fine debut album matching both the romantic streak of Conor Oberst and multi-instrumental sophistication of Sufjan Stevens" --Q Magazine (**** 'Recommended')

"You could dig through a whole month's worth of fuzzy, home-recorded pop and not find a record as sweetly weird, as intelligently eccentric as this one. (Some of us have.) Kids Aflame is the good stuff, as loosely played as it is meticulously plotted." --Dusted Magazine

"[ARMS] readily demonstrates a knack for the slowly building, triumphant-sounding anthem that's still a little downbeat no matter what." --AllMusic.com

"I'm always hesitant to make claims about the year's best albums, but I just can't help myself here. Kids Aflame is just as lovely, complex, jarring, rocking, and re-playable as we could have hoped..."
--IGuessI'mFloating.com

For the past few years, Todd Goldstein was best known as the guitarist in the Brooklyn indie-pop band Harlem Shakes. To those who were listening closely, though, Goldstein has always been ARMS, a persona he's been crafting since 2004. As ARMS, Goldstein takes up a decidedly slower, sweeter, sloppier endeavor, working alone and singing in a sad, idiosyncratic baritone. ARMS' debut full-length, Kids Aflame—previously available only in the UK (melodic), and now released in the US by Gigantic Music—is a labor of love by an artist with an ear for the beauty in noise, the primacy of melody, and the timelessness of melancholy pop music.

By most definitions of the well-worn term, Kids Aflame is a lo-fi album—Goldstein cobbled the record together over three years, holing up with a single microphone and a laptop in a series of rickety bedroom recording spaces. And yet, the songs speak to something grander than lo-fi's usual emotional vocabulary, harnessing elements of shoegaze and classic country, Brian Eno's instrumental weirdness and Stephin Merritt's wry melancholy. Vintage reverb coats nearly everything; voices distort like an old Ricky Nelson LP; keyboards buzz and hum beneath brash, out-of-time drums; creaking doors and police sirens find their way into the mix. Kids Aflame's songs explode out of their context, pushing at the format's boundaries until light seeps from the cracks.

ARMS' world is a scary place, an amoral fever dream in which friends turn into stairs, watch each other die in slaughterhouses, and fall desperately, absurdly in love. The songs tell stories of hopeful, confused characters whose concerns remain frighteningly real, even as their worlds spin off into fantastical realms. The boom-crash anthem "Tiger Tamer" curses the passing of time as the narrator contemplates killing his parents; the gauzy lament "Fall" describes a shadowy act of violence that rips a couple apart. Kids Aflame's title track is the centerpiece: a wickedly catchy ukulele-pop tune in which children set each other on fire, forming alliances and betraying confidences while running around engulfed in flames. Its concept may be odd, but "Kids Aflame" is deadly serious, a blown-out vision of the teenage emotional landscape as apocalyptic dream world.

And yet, for all Kids Aflame's lyrical darkness and confusion, ARMS' music is disarmingly sweet stuff, with a hopeful core that shines through in its indelible, heartbreaking melodies. For all of the labels that could apply to ARMS, Goldstein's mission is simple: to build music that keeps lonely listeners company and guides them safely through the night.

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