Kamikaze Hearts : Awake at Dawn

Most everybody else at that hour is either sleeping or floating between worlds on a cloud of dreams.

The Kamikaze Hearts’ Matthew Loiacono is wide awake and at work before the dawn even threatens to crack the night-time darkness. He is surrounded by gunny sacks filled with
coffee beans from Guatemala and Antigua, the softer side of a John Coltrane CD plays
in the background.

"You have to be able to think with your head,” he says, looking through the coffee shop’s front window that faces Broadway.
“You have to have business savvy. This we figured out two or three years ago," he says
about his other work, playing the mandolin, banjo and guitar with ‘The Hearts,’ as he calls them.

Loiacono reckons one of things that separates his band from most is talented songwriting.
"In the band, we have two members who are real good songwriters, very different kinds of songwriters," he says, laughing, "And I'm not one of them."

The band formed in late 1999 and has enjoyed success in the Capital Region music scene ever since. In 2003, the group's self-titled CD caught the ear of CMJ - the national college music scene's Bible - and began a steady climb up the magazine's charts, listed alongside
a number of the music world's most notable pop luminaries. It is pretty much an
unparalleled achievement for an unsigned band from Saratoga.

More than 100 College radio stations across North America picked up on the Kamikaze Hearts and started giving the band airplay, an even higher achievement for the group whose sound doesn't easily fit into any one preordained radio category.
It is a unique style that also affects the venues where they choose to perform.

"We're not quite loud enough to be in the rock clubs, and just not quiet enough for being
in the folk clubs," Loiacono says. "But there are those places in between that we are successful."

Some of those places have included The Iron Horse in Northhampton, Mass., the Palace Theatre, and the Linda Norris Auditorium in Albany to promote a show for radio station WAMC.

Their niche is the result of a sound that draws as much from the straw-sewn tumbleweeds
of the bluegrass farmlands as it does from mournful and lonely asphalt blues.
"The most important thing about getting together in a room to play is that when you come see us on stage, you're going to get an honest experience," he says.
"It's very loose, very human. You want the audience to go away from it having a really
good night”

"There's a ton of songs that we haven't released and we're figuring the best way to put them
out there," Loiacono says. "The last (self-titled CD) is about 28 minutes long, and it's perfect. You just put it on and it doesn't get in the way of anything, and it's nice to listen to."

"Tired of fields, I march through the building," the Hearts sing on the track "Beverly Hills," while a mandolin plays high-pitched counter-rhythms to the drone of acoustic strums, all enveloped in the band's multiple layers of voices.
There is also the uprooted rave-up of the REM-like "War Horse," the open prairie wrangling
of "Secret Handshake," and the acoustic rocker "Five Point Turn," which depicts a harmonizing reminiscent of the classic hums of the song "Eight Miles High."

The CD finale, a tune called "In My Way," starts out like a campfire prayer started by Neil Young before it vaults into a rapid momentous VU-type crescendo that ends with the
lonely pounding of a single fading drum.
Loiacono will have none of the comparisons though..

"A lot of people peg us as Wilco fans," he offers by way of an explanation. "But really - we're not."
The Kamikaze Hearts have been putting together songs for a new album in between performances. “We continue to chip away at the album,” the band offers, “we promise
that it will be released - sometime this decade.”

by Thomas Dimopoulos / published in The Saratogian