Konks

  • Konks
  • The Konks (Bomp!) 2005 

Greasy R&B, early rock and roll, ’70s punk and garage rock of all vintages drive the Konks’ raw, wild debut, which chokes maximum energy from a familiar lo-fi bash-and-roll format. Innovative? Nope, but that hardly matters as these blues-based stompers, informed by Hasil Adkins and the Sex Pistols, are savaged by the trio of ex-Coffin Lids members Jon Porth (bass) and Bob Wilson (guitar) and singer/drummer Kurt Davis. Davis’ gritty, upper-register growl, appealingly devolved from his days as Bullet LaVolta frontman Yukki Gipe, is the band’s trashy backbone and does constant battle with Wilson’s overdistorted gutter guitar. These dozen tracks of crud-encrusted loudness boast the best band theme song in recent memory (“29 Fingers,” noting both Wilson’s missing digit and Davis’ minimal kit of “two lousy drums,” namely a snare and a tom), a nifty Count Five-style psychedelic fuzz breakdown (“Here She Comes”) and a raunchy version of Soupy Sales’ “King Kong.” It all ends with a serious thrashing of Aerosmith’s “Let the Music Do the Talking,” thus squeezing a little more fresh juice from a durable genre that’s nearly been sucked dry. (The band name is of a more recent vintage, having been used by New York singer/songwriter John Dunbar in 1999 for a Kinks tribute.)

[Jim Glauner]