Genre: Hard Rock
Members: Dave Pelsue (vocals), Nate Ehman (guitar), Eric Carter (drums), Willie Bostic (bass)
For fans of: Further Seems Forever, Spoken, Chevelle, Fugazi, The Juliana Theory
Label: Flicker Records

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Give us your tired, your poor, your pubescent and pretentious screamo lightweights—seriously, hand them over. We know they're boring you. In exchange, we offer Kids in the Way, a relentlessly hooky Indianapolis quartet inoculated against the hissyfit plague infecting so many of their peers. Their third full-length, A Love Hate Masquerade, is a throwback testament to earnest, rogue, stripped-down rock and roll, and it couldn't come at a better time. The new school has failed—Kids in the Way have the conch, and they're not planning to let go.

"The album title kinda sums it up," says guitarist Nate Ehman. "It's basically about good and bad relationships and the way we hide the bad to make it look good. I would say the theme is definitely very romantic… and the opposite of that."

Love and hate are obviously polar ends of the emotional spectrum. Frontman Dave Pelsue drags himself from end to end on this record and, somehow, beyond. At various points on Masquerade he both despises himself for self-destructive infatuations ("My Little Nightmare") and delights in indulging them ("Sugar"). He invents a variety of plainspoken, expressive characters struggling to find their footing in the whirlwind, and while he declines to detail specifics, one can guess the real man is uncomfortably wandering somewhere between them all, fighting every day to see through the darkness.

"Basically the record is about realizing that you're in a state of self destruction and hopefully finding your way out of that," Pelsue says. "It's like you're in a relationship and you know it's not gonna work out for either of you, but you're at a point where you don't want to start over so you're just kind of hanging onto whatever emotions are still existing."

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