I’ve heard music critics utter the words “rock is dead” so many times I can’t stand it. Rock has been declared dead more times than Rasputin and it’s easy to see why. The airwaves are dominated by wholly unimpressive bands and pop starlets with more booty than voice. The mainstream music scene has become stagnant and predictable with the masses buying up anything that the likes of Clear Channel and VH1 tell them to. Fans of music who feel personally insulted by crap-rock such as Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco have to dig a little deeper to find music with substance and lasting quality.
But sometimes that music is right in your own backyard.
Kill The Ego have been playing around Oxford for about a year or so now. Their reputation as learned musicians and reverent students of rock is well earned, so when I got my hands on their first release, Slaves Love Masters, I was hoping for the best and expecting to be let down. I mean, how can a band with such a ferocious live sound possibly match that heart-felt aggression on CD? Luckily for us, they more or less did just that.
The record’s seven tracks run the rock gamut. Their myspace page cites their influences as Black Sabbath, the Pixies, Ramones and Fugazi but I’m just not hearing any of Sabbath’s bottom-end doom and gloom here. In fact, I don’t detect any metal in their sound at all. What is glaringly obvious is the impact that Fugazi and the Pixies have had on the Ego guys. KTE aren’t afraid to play around with the quiet-loud dynamics that were the hallmark of the Pixies, nor do they shy away from the more tension-filled aspects of Fugazi’s catalog (this is a good thing, top 40 fans).
Vocalist/guitarist Max Hipp’s guitar tone may sound familiar at first listen but he’s pushing those tones into places that their influences have overlooked. On the album opener “What You Call Living” the boys waste no time letting you know what the record is about; energy and smart fun. The song somehow sounds like the aural equivalent of a boxer bobbing and weaving, ducking one way when you expect it to go the other. On “Pricks” the guitar –work during the first verse is an exercise in tension a la the criminally overlooked but essential Shellac, building toward a chorus that simply explodes with catchiness. Never have lyrics like “Whooooooo-woo-hoo-oooooo!” sounded so damned righteous and meaningful, and it’s due to the slow burn that Hipp and company deliver. From the first chorus forward the tune chugs along like an 18-wheeler driven by a Falknerian idiot man-child, dangerous and fun as hell.
Fist-pumping choruses and anthemic guitars play their part, naturally, but what makes the whole thing work on deeper level are the lyrics and their juxtaposition to the song structure. “If You Want It” sounds like music to raise hell with your old high school buddies to but lyrics like “It’s much easier to get with a stranger than to pretend we’re who we used to be” and “I feel like I was the desert and you were the rain cloud over me” reveal the story of a marriage falling apart and the bitterness that comes along with that. The joyous inflection in Hipp’s vocal delivery clash with the lyrical content and the result is downright powerful. What exactly the “it” in the title is referring to is left up to debate. Is it divorce or sex? If the former, then ouch. If the latter, then damn, that’s brutal.
The great thing about records, indeed bands, like this is the timelessness of it all. I’ll be listening to “Slaves Love Masters” in ten, twenty years. No gimmicky Kanye West remixes for these gentlemen. No slick production tricks to make the bottom-end “heavier” or the vocals pitch-perfect. That sort of nonsense would severely date the material. The songwriting is heavy enough as is, thank you very much. And the vocals evoke plenty enough on their own merits. Kill The Ego stand in diametric opposition to the Top 40 hackery currently being spewed forth from radios across the nation. And that, music fans, is what art should be about.
