K-Holes – K-Holes
Hozac: 2011
I finished another listen of this LP, and I feel like my body just got dragged over yards of concrete again. You remember that Godz record Lester Bangs praised from heavens to betsy, the one where they couldn’t even play their instruments and they just soaked everything in brown acid? This record proves that the Godz have some grandchildren to bounce on their knee, by the name of Brooklyn’s K-Holes.
Out of absolutely no ambition, except to play a single show of “surf dirge” as their official bio puts it, K-Holes have mutated into a scary, disgusting band. The formula’s three ladies and two dudes – your usual guitar, bass, drums set up plus a depraved saxophone — who’ve been hanging around the Brooklyn underground playing puke rock, putting dead rats in their guitar headstocks and performing sex acts on microphones on Halloween. They’ve been reveling in their collective anonymity, despite leeching members from NYC’s Golden Triangle and Atlanta’s Black Lips. For proof, just look at the listing of their names on Facebook: Bam Bam, Creepy D, Sax 5th Ave, Cha Cha Khan, and Jungalaya. They sound like a bunch of teen gangsters. Now, after cutting their teeth in their city’s dive bars, K-Holes are bidding to make a name for themselves as a collective with this assured and remarkably strong debut LP.
Although their PR claims that the K-Holes wiped all the “surf” away from their aesthetic in favor of evolving a sound with the consistency of slug mucus, there’s still some ghosts of the past on K-Holes. “Native Tongues” opens the record and has a Dick Dale-esque guitar reverb still alive and paddling, but it’s pushed far out of focus behind some guttural, crunching bass and drums. It might be more appropriate to say that the care-free summer vibe of surf rock is replaced with a dank swampy revelry here that, on first listen, comes across as a mess. But it’s all by design. After a few tours through the terrain, the skill behind the K-holes managed chaos shows more clearly. Where the songwriting is loose, it’s intentionally so. This isn’t an album to be reasoned with in the head or dissected as poetry, it’s meant solely to be felt in your stomach, and the listener’s focus should be on the album’s gross atmosphere.
They play music for alley burn-outs, like they should with a name like the K-Holes, but they’ve got smarts. The sudden change from a torturously slow tempo on “Gutter” to a quick, brutal instrumental chorus proves their true musical chops, and they pay their due respects to eighties DC hardcore on “Speedy Greedy” and detroit garage rock on “Short Zippers”. Even “Swamp Fires” is essentially a Mississippi delta blues standard channeled through the spirit of Roky Erikson, but despite all these varied influences on K-Holes, the Brooklynites sounds like a band that knows exactly what it’s doing at almost all times. The only major misstep on this debut is the inclusion of “Step and Fetch”, a track that lands with a little too much hopscotch and girl-pop to fit in with the rest of the album’s grime.
It’s moments like “Step and Fetch” that show K-Holes are still maturing as a collective, but it’s easy to hear how much love and excitement these five individuals have for this band. In the best of worlds, they’ll never lose that edge, and K-Holes will stay as rank as they gloriously are here. This music is absolutely shameless, but it also has a lot of courage on its side as a result.
4 out of 5
