Kill Creek isn't a very noticeable landmark. Just a small stream flowing south toward the Wakarusa about halfway between Kansas City, Missouri and Lawrence, Kansas. My girlfriend and I drive that stretch of I-70 a lot when I visit her at her parents' house in Lawrence. There's something relaxing about the wide open spaces and gently rolling terrain of Northeastern Kansas after a long flight from the East Coast, and there's something to the lay of the land that makes winters there seem extra cold.

The guys in Kill Creek must know the same stretch of highway pretty well-- it runs through the cornfields they used to get drunk in after their earliest shows back in the late 80s, when they were still attending high school in Lawrence. Their music has a certain chill of winter to it that most bands of a similar ilk don't possess. Otherwise, the band occupies territory somewhere between the Get Up Kids, the Promise Ring, Mineral, and something entirely less strained and more current that I can't quite put my finger on.

Whereas their older records, like 1996's Proving Winter Cruel, fell closely in step with standard emo trends of the mid-90s, their latest effort, Colors of Home, shows that the long gap between the two albums has thrown their sound open considerably. For one thing, the tempos are all over the place, often staying slow for some surprisingly spacious, quiet material. The layered group vocals of the opener, "Hardly Accounted For," offer a promising start to an album that, for all its admirable intents and considerable effort, simply doesn't deliver much.

"Hardly Accounted For" segues smoothly into "Gett Up," which rides in on echoing drums with more well-sung harmonies before devolving into aimless guitar crunching and overwrought drumming. There's no math in this Midwestern rock, just tempered bombast and a definitive lack of direction. Both "Hardly Accounted For" and "Gett Up" end abruptly, before they feel like they've run their full course. "Gett Up" sounds great, though, when compared to the song that follows.

"Without It" is full of earnestly churning guitars, vocals stretched beyond their capabilities into tuneless, obnoxious yelling, and lyrics like, "A wait/ A time/ Alone/ A doubt/ A thought/ A weight/ I wrote/ A vow/ A shred/ Of truth/ A lie/ Of sorts/ Without a word." To be fair, these are the band's lyrics at their absolute worst, but the tired emo of the song's music has counterparts in several other songs, like "Mousetrap," "Serotonin," and "Grandfather's Left Side."

The band are far better off when they venture away from blandness of the songs mentioned above for tracks like "The Divorcee," a mostly acoustic, drumless tune aided immensely by atmospheric keyboards and a downplayed trumpet solo. The only problem is that the song has so little memorable melodic content that it plays more like a Rothko than a Caravaggio-- there's a lot of color, but little else. This isn't always a bad thing-- hell, I love Mark Rothko's paintings-- but on what's essentially a power-pop record, it feels rather incongruous. That said, it's a direction I hope the band continues in, because it holds a lot more promise than most of the other styles they work in.

Another welcome addition to the band's sound is the slide guitar that crops up on "Cops" and "Kathleen." In the former, it serves as a distant response to the melodic vocals, creeping forth from the back of the mix. In the latter, it's a welcome contrast to the caterwauling vocals and frantically strummed guitars of the chorus.

The album closes with "Prying," a soft, percussion-free song colored by a hint of banjo that, though nice enough, really doesn't leave much of an impression. Kill Creek have certainly improved since their last outing, and it seems likely that they'll continue to do so in the future. But while they may have made their best album to date, they still seem a bit lost in the former West.

-Joe Tangari, November 27th, 2001