I was fortunate enough last night to be invited to Brooklyn to check out a Kings Destroy practice and hear some of their new material as it’s coming together for their next record. If you’ll recall, their first album, …And the Rest Will Surely Perish, was put out on The Maple Forum, and I’ve dug on their stuff since their Old Yeller/Medusa debut 7″ came my way back in 2010. They’re good guys and a killer band.

They recently recorded a few new demos in Hoboken with Mike Moebius at his Moonlight Studios, and in their practice space, they ran through that material — songs like “The Toe” and “Holy Dice of Thunder,” which I’ve seen them do live a couple times, and “Pain Trade” — as well as some others still under construction. The new tunes are better than they know, and even though some were still pretty formative, I feel like I got a decent picture of where they’re headed.

One real look at Aaron Bumpus playing bass and you can tell almost immediately he’s the kind of player who could fit anywhere. Sure, his Sunn amp may have filled the room with the smell of melting tubes, but I swear, put that dude in a suit on stage with a jazz trio and he could probably handle it. He’s really just beginning to make his presence felt in Kings Destroy, and I think there’s room for him to add more to his fills, but he works really well with Rob Sefcik‘s drumming.

As for the songs, “Pain Trade” cops the beginning progression of the “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” riff just enough to nod to the converted, but on the whole, they feel much less limited to genre and more self-assured. The first record, killer as it was (and it was) was very purposefully doomed. Doom was the mission. From what I could tell as I grooved out to the new songs, the doom is happening more naturally now. One riff that Chris Skowronski and Carl Porcaro ran through that was still basically skeletal reminded me of the chorus to “Love Hate Love” from Alice in Chains‘ Facelift, but they were able to make it work in the context of what they were doing, and Steve Murphy‘s vocal cadence took it somewhere else entirely. It was awesome to watch and I felt lucky to see it.

They have a lot of work ahead of them yet, but they could easily play four or five of those songs live and pull them off, and progress is being made. As a show of same and a way to preview the direction of the yet-untitled second Kings Destroy record, the band recently cut a video with director Lucia Grillo for the demo of “The Toe.” It’s pretty foggy, but they’re all in there, trying their damnedest not to look at the camera. I hope you dig it:

Tags: Brooklyn, Kings Destroy, New York

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.