Family Band, Brooklyn: Kim Krans, Jonny Ollsin and the Records They Made Here

Two Bands, One Name, One Domain

This address belonged to an American duo before it carried anything about the English band Family. They were called Family Band, they were based in Brooklyn, and enough of the music press wrote about them that people still arrive here looking for their record sleeves and their tour dates. Rather than send those visitors to a dead end, this page sets out who they were.

Who Family Band Were

Family Band was Kim Krans, a visual artist who became the group’s singer, and Jonny Ollsin, a guitarist who had come out of the heavy end of things - he had previously played in S.T.R.E.E.T.S. and in Children. The two met in the Catskill mountains in 2005 and kept writing there afterwards, in a two-room cabin they built themselves. From 2008, Scott Hirsch became part of how the records sounded.

Their own description of the music was “heavy mellow”, which is about as accurate as two words can be: Ollsin’s guitar sat heavy underneath and Krans sang over it, stark and unhurried, with the cold of the mountains audible somewhere in it. Reviewers reached for country gothic, for early Cat Power, and for Warpaint - the band toured with Warpaint in 2011.

The Records

The first release was an EP called Blessed, self-released in 2008. The album Miller Path followed in April 2010, also self-released, and it is the record most of the coverage from that period is about - the video for “Children” premiered through Stereogum and The Fader that spring. A Cold Songs EP was sold alongside it. Then in July 2012 the duo signed to No Quarter Records, which released their second album, Grace & Lies. In August of that year they played NPR’s World Cafe.

The vinyl pressing of Miller Path sold out and was, for a while, the thing the band’s own store led with. Touring was handled through Strange Victory Touring, and they turned up at SXSW in March more than once. After 2014 the group stopped putting out records; Kim Krans went on to work under the name The Wild Unknown.

What the Coverage Was About

The press attention clustered around 2010 and 2012 rather than spreading evenly. The first wave came with Miller Path: a Brooklyn blog wrote up the recording retreat the pair had built in the Catskills, an eMusic selection followed, and the video for “Children” went out through two of the larger music sites in the same month. Reviews of that record tended to reach for the same comparisons - country gothic, the colder end of Cat Power, the Cowboy Junkies - and to note how much of the sound came from the gap between a heavy guitarist and a singer who never raised her voice.

The second wave came with the label deal. Grace & Lies arrived in July 2012 with a distributor behind it, and the World Cafe session followed in August. Then the releases stopped. Nothing dramatic appears to have happened; the duo simply moved on, and Krans took the work that had been the visual side of the band into a project of its own.

Where the Store, the Tunes and the Bio Went

The store, tunes, bio and shows pages the duo once kept here are long gone, and what survives of them is the record above: the releases, the label, the dates and the two names. The facts are the ones the band stated on those pages themselves, with the release dates and the label as the press coverage carried them.

This page is not official and not connected to the duo. Nor is the Brooklyn band connected to Family, the English rock band this site is otherwise about, beyond the coincidence of the word.