Reviews
The Kill Devil Hills
The Drought
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Add to del.ico.us.Review Date: 2007-10-14
Let me tell you all a little bit about the rock music. For the uninitiated. For those of you who know, just say “fuck yeh” and drink your beer furiously, but with solemnity because we are, after all, talking about the rock music. You’ve got your New World, right? Colonized by lilly white imperial colonists… they don’t count. Because, moreover, you’ve got two kinds of immigrants. The semi-voluntary Irish, Russian, and French who fled their shitty polities, and hauled ass over seas to find that they weren’t really all that better off. But they had their culture, and that kept ‘em going. And the involuntary black slaves who were thrown onto boats and shipped to The Americas to do the work the aforementioned lilly white imperialists didn’t want to do. It’s true, I saw it on A & E. They had nothing but their culture too. So you’ve got a continent built by poor people, with hard lives, taking solace in their culture… their music. You mix immigrant A’s rhapsodic folk music: fiddles, guitars, tin whistles; with immigrant B’s heavy, intoxicating rhythm. Next, you throw in some twentieth century electric ingenuity and more jacked-up amplification than any of us really know what to do with to this day… and you’ve got Rock, my good good friend. This is an oversimplification, it’s true, but nobody’s keeping you out of the library, so look it up.
Now in the seventies the rock music took a drastic turn. Not for the worse, mind you. In some ways the jazz and soul ingredients - of which rock is partially comprised – took the driver’s seat, with blues and country left riding bitch. So we got Funk, then Disco, then Hip-hop, and whatever it was they thought they were doing in the eighties. Again, not really complaining; except to say that other, equally ass-kicking aspects of rock music were left without an heir. Or marginalized into obscurity. Zeppelin, The Allman Bros, Steppenwolf and the like were all banished to the realm of “classic rock”, with a brief resurgence in grunge. Or else they were bastardized by Bon Jovi and we ended up with cock-rockers like Nickleback. It’s almost futile to say at this point, but fuck Nickleback.
It doesn’t have to be this way, folks. The Kill Devil Hills, and Australian band, have latched on to this pre-cockrock sound with tenacity. Their album The Drought really keeps the faith. The influences are so various, I won’t waste much time listing them. Suffice it to say that their sound is a smorgasbord of so-called classic rock influences. Nothing extremely groundbreaking – it’s the proportions of each rock ingredient that make this band appealing.
They create an oldschool, shitkicking atmosphere with an ensemble similar to the one Bob Dylan cultivated during his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, in ’75. There are a number of folk/blues instruments like the obvious acoustic guitar, the too-seldom used mandolin, fiddle, the banjo, tin whistle, bass etc. But they’re all amped-up, electric, and borderline Metal. Each of these instruments, it should be noted, are expertly plied. The fiddle player, especially, frames every piece with a frenetic kind of energy – even during the ballads. And there are multiple lead vocalists who trade off center stage: all of whom sound like they’re drunk, smoke too much, and maybe shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Just like you like it.
Songs to pirate? Well there’s “Dogs O’ War”, which has a real heavy electric blues foundation, with a wicked little Sabbath-like lick on the chorus. If you like it a little slower, maybe you’ll prefer the title track “The Drought”. This song is a hangover with some slight string hallucinations, and a distant female back-up chorus. It also boasts some of the better lyrics on the album. Classic, everyman lyrics, with a slight tendency towards poetic absurdity: “I’m gonna kill a man cos he stole my boat. Takin’ it easy, takin’ it slow.”
Sounds good so far? Um… well, yeah. There is a catch. It’s something that, as a life-long “classic rock” fan, I’ve spent a while coming to grips with. Many of the classic bands I mentioned before have, once and awhile, tapped into another – altogether repulsive but undeniably influential – rock influence. I’m talking about what is known today as Country/Western. There are a lot of rock bands who tend to ride a fine line between the rock I love, and the dingy hotel bar in Alberta smelling vaguely of vomit jukebox tripe that I despise. Even the greats have gone off the deep end in this way: The Allman Bros. sometime after Duane died, and Greg married Cher (blech). And even, at times, though it pains me to say it, Bob D… Bob D… Robert Zimerm… I can’t. I just can’t, don’t make me.
Tired-out, wasted ballads with too much twang and not enough inspiration make you stop for a moment, when listening to The Drought. These songs make you wonder what you’re listening to? Is that Country and Western Music? And how can I look at myself in the mirror when this is on the stereo? Songs like “This Old Town,” and “Jesus Train” (hail Satan) really bring this album down. I won’t describe them, and anyway you’ve heard it before. Probably in the same dingy hotel bar in Alberta smelling vaguely of vomit that I heard ‘em in.
But these songs are proportionally few in terms of the album. And, anyway, that’s what the skip button on your stereo is for. The rest of the album packs a lot of punch… and someone spiked that punch… with blow. I’m telling you, it’s good times. So good, in fact, that you may be compelled to write a pedantic and patronising tirade about the history of rock for a bunch of music geeks who almost certainly already know. But if I can just reach one Nickleback fan, man, just one… then I’ll die with a smile on my face… and my cock in Chad Kroeger’s mom.
Score: 7.7
- Glyn Bowerman