“Walking This” by Kye Kye, Tuesday, May 10, 2022
In the early '10s, electronic music inspired by the '80s was making a comeback. While Rock music was still king in the Christian circles, the bands that had brought Christian Rock to the mainstream stopped selling records, and record labels started phasing out Rock bands. But somewhere between the hard rockers and the teeny boppers, Alternative was shifting to incorporate everything else. And with that shift, many female Alternative musicians emerged. In this new shift, Christian music had the opportunity to develop and promote a band based on programming, organic, and synthetic sounds: Kye Kye.
I'M A FIRE THAT LIGHTS WHATEVER'S IN SIGHT. The Estonian-born Yagolnikov siblings talk about their musical influences in a 2014 interview at New Zealand's most famous Christian Rock festival, Parachute Music Festival. Growing up listening to European synth-pop their parents listened to in Estonia shaped the musical direction the band would write. The sounds they captured on their two first two albums, Young Love and Fantasize were, to the siblings, a realization of the music of their childhoods. According to an interview with tuned UP, Kye Kye get their name from the Greek letter Chi and the band's name is a reference to the early church. Their first album was produced by Future of Forestry's Eric Owyoung, and the rich musical textures blend both organic instruments and electronic elements into a dreamy, spiritual sound. The band supported worship leader John Mark McMillan on tour. In the band's promotion of Young Love when speaking with tuned Up, Kye Kye states that their mission was "to express [their] relationship with God through music," but as of the social media announcements with last year's album Arya, the group seems to be distancing themselves from Christian music.
CLOSEST FRIEND, I'M LOST IN LOVE. While the lyrics on Young Love make the most sense in a Christian and a spiritual context, the lyrics are not straight-forward. When Timothy Yagolnikov talks about the lyrics on Fantasize in the Parachute Music Festival interview, he says that the lyrics were inspired by scripture that readers often read quickly without digesting the meaning of the words. He says that readers must read slowly and meditate on the meanings of the words. Perhaps that's what Kye Kye intended when they write lyrics. The two songs on Young Love "Knowing This" and "Walking This" seem to be spiritual twins. On the standard edition of the album "Knowing This" comes just before "Walking This," but on the remix EP, the songs are reversed in order. "Knowing This" seems to be based on lines from scripture, while "Walking This" seems to take the information from "Knowing This" and applies it. "Walking This" is perhaps about the Christian walk. Lead singer Olga Yagolnikov Phelan gives a soft, but bright confidence in her role, anointed by God to live like Christ on the earth. However, the vague lyrics are open to interpretation to whatever that means to the band today.
Studio version:
Remix:
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