The wandering, pondering punks of Kite Party get their act together.

"After five in the morning, you lose all objectivity."

PARTY PEOPLE: Kite Party — (L-R) Pat Conaboy, Andre Pagani, Justin Fox, Russell Edling and Tim Jordan — came up in the Tamaqua, Pa., D.I.Y. scene.
Neal Santos

Ask Russell Edling, singer/guitarist of Philadelphia band Kite Party, pretty much anything about his life right now, and he’ll answer along the lines of, “I have no idea what is going on.”

That’s not entirely true. At the moment, Edling and the other members of Kite Party at this interview — singer/bassist Tim Jordan, drummer Pat Conaboy and guitarist/keyboardist Justin Fox — know that they are doing a number of things: Relaxing in a Fishtown backyard beneath the blare of an ice cream truck; drinking cheap beer; fondly petting a pomeranian named Biscuit; and excitedly talking over one another regarding their sophomore record, Come on Wandering, out this week on Animal Style Records. (Not present in the backyard is guitarist Andre Pagani.)

There’s good enough reason for their excitement. It’s been three years since they released their debut Baseball Season, and Come on Wandering almost never even happened. 

“Basically, we’re really good at procrastinating,” Conaboy laughs, in a no-but-seriously kind of way. With a five-member band whose sound is as densely layered as Kite Party’s — and whose every songwriting decision requires five resounding yeses — these things take time. Specifically: the bulk of 2013, often during late night studio sessions, often with parts recorded minutes after being written.

“There were so many times where seven in the morning would come up and we would sit there and think, ‘Yeah, that’s good, that’s fine,’” Jordan says. “Then we would go back and listen to it and realize how loud and stupid it was. After five in the morning, you lose all objectivity.”

Philadelphia is a good place for Kite Party. Jordan, Edling and Fox grew up in the economically depressed Tamaqua, Pa., where the narrative for bored, under-stimulated teenagers usually follows the directions of: Getting really into football. Getting really into drugs. Or starting bands and booking shows in fire halls. Kite Party was birthed from the last wave of  Tamaqua’s D.I.Y. scene, and it’s a cycle that feels specifically Pennsylvanian. “It was reasonably easy to rent out a community center for $150 and tell this band from Pittsburgh, ‘Yo, we’ll give you a hundred bucks if you come play,” Fox says. “It’s total Pennsyltucky shit, and that’s what Tamaqua is.”

Like many of these bands from small, Northeast Pennsylvania towns (the Menzingers, Title Fight, Tigers Jaw), Kite Party found a living, breathing and growing ecosystem in the Philly punk scene. But they don’t really sound like those bands. They’re not even too sure as to what they sound like, but thank you very much for asking. 

“Sometimes I think that we’re a weird band. Then I think of, like, weird bands,” Edling says. “We’re a punk band, and we’re not a punk band, and we like the Velvet Underground and we like NOFX. We are just heavily products of our environment.” Fox begins developing a metaphor about Australian mammals to describe Kite Party’s sound, but it doesn’t exactly go anywhere, and his thought gets derailed, so he cracks open another beer instead. 

Come on Wandering is a shimmering, reverb-drenched meditation on this; on accepting that there aren’t many answers within that terrifying window of young adulthood; not knowing, and accepting that. “All that I am is a fire lost in the woods,” Edling sings on the ghost-folk “River Rocks / Forest Fire,” but earlier in the record, on “Halflife,” he’s singing of how “the fires will all blow over and I’ll still be on your shoulder.” Identities shift. Friends leave. What can we do about it?

“When I was 14 I had assumptions about who I would be by the time I would be 22,” Edling says. “I’m fucking 25 right now and I don’t know how to be this age. It doesn’t mean anything. And I feel perpetually young, ignorant, stupid and wrong.”

Fox recalls the track “Nest,” about his friend from Tamaqua who developed a heroin addiction, to tackle this feeling specifically. It’s a highlight on Come on Wandering, its sparse arrangement and use of empty space aids Fox’s passive observation of it all. “Coming from that small town, that could’ve been any of us,” Fox says. “And rather than try to make any sense of it, sometimes it’s better to ruminate on how fucking weird that is. 

“Everything’s confusing,” Fox says. “I feel like this is a super …” He doesn’t finish his sentence, maybe because he realizes he doesn’t have to. Instead, he just shrugs.

“But also, fuck it?” 

Thu., May 8, 7:30 p.m., $7, with Three Man Cannon, Gunk, Thin Lips and The spirit of the beehive, PhilaMOCA, 531 N. 12th St., 267-519-9651, philamoca.org.