Kicking Giant

Indie rock duo Kicking Giant brought together vocalist and guitarist Tae Won Yu with drummer Rachel Carns, who first connected in 1989 during their time as art students in New York City. Their debut cassette-only outing, January, surfaced that same year, followed by three subsequent tapes—Boyfriend Girlfriend, Secret Teenage Summer, and Present—each appearing a year apart. In 1992 the pair shifted base to Olympia, Washington, where they assembled the 1993 anthology Halo drawn from those prior recordings. They next joined K Records, issuing the single “She’s Real” within the label’s International Pop Underground series, then delivered the full-length Alien I.D. in 1994. Although tracks by the duo surfaced on two compilations in 2005, both members had already turned toward separate endeavors. Carns entered the Need and cut four albums with the group from 1997 through 2001 before performing with King Cobra and TWIN and contributing to numerous other releases. Yu pursued visual art, creating album covers for Built to Spill along with paintings, photographs, and children’s books. In 2013 Yu launched the brief project Poses, and at one of its concerts he and Carns joined forces for a brief Kicking Giant set—their first appearance together since 2006. Over the following years they reconvened for scattered shows, among them the Chickfactor 25th anniversary in 2017. Near the same period Drawing Room Records pressed Halo on vinyl for the initial time.