ARMS Kids Aflame (Gigantic)
Release Date: October 27th

"A wild and refreshingly noisy ride." –NME

"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

"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..." --I GuessI'mFloating.com

To people with a passing interest in such things, Todd Goldstein is the guitarist in the Brooklyn indie-pop band Harlem Shakes. To those who listen closely, though, Todd Goldstein is 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, 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. 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. The songs tell stories of hopeful, confused characters whose concerns remain frighteningly real, even as their worlds spin off into fantastical realms. Kids Aflame's title track is the centerpiece: a wickedly catchy ukulele-pop tune in which children set each other on fire. Its concept may be odd, but "Kids Aflame" is deadly serious, a blown-out vision of the teenage emotional landscape as apocalyptic dream world.

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.

http://www.armsarms.com/cms/ // http://www.myspace.com/armsongs

For all press inquiries please contact Brooke Black at Big Hassle Media,  212. 619.1360, brooke@bighassle.com.