Sharp Pins: a teenage four-track comes off the shelf
Kai Slater's cassette of covers and rough takes, recorded on a Tascam Porta One before anyone knew his name, gets remastered for vinyl and digital. Nothing about it has been tidied.
BY JOLT Staff · SEP 11 2026 · 3 min readMod Mayday 23 is a teenager's four-track tape. Kai Slater recorded it on a Tascam Porta One, put it out as a cassette, and Amy Dragon has remastered it for vinyl and digital. Eleven songs, covers and rough takes, a little over thirty minutes. The reissue does not tidy any of it.
Slater plays in the Chicago post-punk trio Lifeguard and in the psychedelic folk group Dwaal Troupe, and he does editorial and publishing work for the Chicago DIY zine Hallogallo. Sharp Pins is his pop outlet. The scratchy freshman tape Turtle Rock came first, then Radio DDR and Balloon Balloon Balloon, both of them wider and cleaner than the one before, plus I Wonder Where You Hide All Your Love. A recent single, "Saturday Sun", points forward. Mod Mayday 23 points back, into the backlog he pulls from regularly.
The title is a straight-faced joke. Mods Mayday '79 compiled British mod bands, Squire and The Mods among them; Slater keeps the name and shrinks the scale to one bedroom. The songs are ones he loves and wanted to record his own way, and three of the covers credit their source: "Love Only Me" and "Tonight's The Night" to The Mods, "Live Without Her Love" to Squire.
The sound is jangle and fuzz at tempos quicker than his recent records, with vocal echoes tucked behind the voice. He sings falsetto on the bubblegum numbers, belts when a chorus asks for it, and drops to a murmur when it does not. Most of these songs are two or three minutes long and none of them behave.
"It's A Mod Mod World" opens and settles the intent in its first bar: sixties pop, no clever modern rewrite. "Face of Youth Today" leads with the jangly guitar figure that has since become his signature. "B-A-B-Y Baby Luv" is the one to play for a skeptic, a restless bass pushing a pop falsetto while the guitar does more than the song asks.
"Let Me Be The One" and "Love Only Me" are the loudest argument for the tape's title, as energetic as anything he has released and almost punk about it, whimsy intact. "Tonight's The Night" is the cleanest recording of the eleven, and its belted vocal comes closest to 2000s indie rock. "Live Without Her Love" carries the most movement, harmonica and a psychedelic solo sitting in the middle of it. Then "Days Of Change" takes the drums away and leaves acoustic strumming under low, wistful singing, like a performance heard from the far end of a park. "Race For The Audience" closes as a demo, handed over before anyone else was listening.
This is for the listener who keeps a Guided By Voices tape in the car and does not need the mix tidy. Ty Segall's early records run through the same rooms, and The Beatles are the obvious ancestor, though Slater arrives at them through fuzz rather than fidelity. If you found Sharp Pins through the cleaner records, or through Lifeguard, the thinness will read as a step back. Headphones on a walk, not a good stereo.
What does not work is the middle run. "Friday Night", "Love Only Me" and "Let Me Be The One" pass in a little over six minutes and smear into one another, and a remaster cannot put weight into a sketch that never had any. Two of the three covers are the best things here, and that is the fair measure of the collection: a sketchbook with a couple of finished pages.
Mod Mayday 23 is the Sharp Pins record you reach for after Radio DDR, not the one you start with. A 3.5, then: a tape, honestly presented, with two covers good enough to carry it. Come back to it later and hear how little he needed.
