Kings Destroy Premiere “Mr. O” Video; Tour Dates with Weedeater Announced
Perhaps most of all on their recently released third, self-titled album (review here), Kings Destroy‘s “Mr. O” is a litmus test to determine who’s going to get it and who isn’t. Easily the most upbeat track they’ve recorded to date, its lyrics refer to Reggie Jackson, who has become in the last several decades analogous not just to a vision of late-’70s power hitting standing in for some mustachioed lost masculine ideal, but more specifically for the era of New York City that Kings Destroy‘s Kings Destroy takes as its central theme. Before the porn shops were closed, before Mayor Rudy Giuliani had the homeless secretly killed (prove it didn’t happen), when the Knicks were good and the Yankees were gods, the streets smelled of piss (some things never change) and there was danger. It wasn’t a place to raise kids. It was a place to get stabbed.
The regularly-showing-up-around-these-parts Brooklynite five-piece of vocalist Steve Murphy, guitarists Carl Porcaro and Chris Skowronski, bassist Aaron Bumpus and drummer Rob Sefcik aren’t so much mourning the loss of that threat in their new Josh Graham-directed video for “Mr. O” as they are speaking to their personal experience of it. For the first half of the clip, we take a tour through the past with Murphy in an awfully nice looking muscle car, and gradually the B-roll takes over, the line, “Ladies and gents, the Bronx is in flames tonight,” as resonant of the time as of any particular performance Jackson ever gave. It’s a remembrance of the idea of a city — theirs is unmistakably New York, but yours doesn’t need to be — and a cultural moment whose time has passed, and in true New Yorker fashion, they don’t couch the idea in some grand metaphor so much as directly confront the listener and viewer with embodiments of that memory, the song thrusting ahead at full punch-in-the-face speed all the while.
To go with the new release on War Crime Recordings, Kings Destroy have announced they’ll hit the road in August alongside Weedeater. I know the two bands had previously played together or close enough to it in Sweden at this or that festival, and it’s hard to imagine they haven’t shared a stage somewhere along the line since, but it should make for a solid pairing of complementary sounds, big riffs, lurching groove and little tolerance for those who can’t or wouldn’t have gotten it anyhow.
Dates follow the video below. Please enjoy:
Kings Destroy, “Mr. O” official video
Weedeater & Kings Destroy on tour:
08/04 Atlanta GA 529
08/05 Savannah GA Jinx
08/06 Charlotte NC Tremont
08/07 Richmond VA Hardywood Brewery
08/08 Sprague WI Farmageddon (Weedeater only)
08/09 Philadelphia PA Johnny Brenda’s
08/10 Boston MA The Sinclair
08/11 Brooklyn NY Saint Vitus
08/12 York PA The Depot
08/13 Pittsburgh PA 31st St. Pub
08/14 Erie PA Sherlocks
08/15 Kent OH Outpost
08/16 Asheville NC Mothlight
Kings Destroy on Thee Facebooks
Tags: Brooklyn, Kings Destroy, Kings Destroy Self-titled, New York City, self-titled, War Crime Recordings