LISTEN:
‘MOUTH FULL OF BEES’
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“Mouth Full Of Bees’ [is] sure to make fans of Jim O’Rourke and Akron/Family happy.” – GIGsoup
“The track represents just a small taste of this genre-less group with its grinding blues as King Ropes can give you garage rock, roots rock, psych and/or country depending what song your shuffle lands on. “Brown” is an over 7-minute story that has all the snapshots of life you would expect from the blues as it moves through despair. confusion and even elation.” – The Fire Note
“For a brief five seconds, you’re tempted to hear this song as some sort of 90s rocker, but soon King Ropes pull away from that, giving off a brief little vocal blurb that resembles that one song from Butthole Surfers that everyone knows. Still, the song’s natural progression isn’t over, it plods slowly, allowing the natural melody in the vocals to build; the guitars and bass still have this ominous tone in the distance behind the voice Dave Hollier. The pinnacle is from the chorus with the line “those California stars they shine and shine;” it’s a sublime pop tidbit amidst a song that avoids the trappings of modern pigeonholing, never staying in one place long enough to bore the listener. This bodes well for Gravity and Friction, out on July 26th!” – Austin Town Hall
Summer/Fall Dates
09.01•Laborfest (Bozeman, MT)
09.25•East Gallatin Yacht Club (Bozeman, MT)
09.26•Monk’s Bar (Missoula, MT)
09.29•WhySound Venue (Logan, UT)
10.16•The white wall sessions (Sioux Falls, SD)
10.18•The Phoenix510 (Hazel Park, MI)
Gravity and Friction, King Ropes’ third release, deals in contrasting attitudes and tonalities, reveling in the process of discovering the connections between dissimilar sounds and compositional instincts. This record is seemingly built from hundreds of spontaneous urges, all vying for dominant control and attention. But in the hands of King Ropes, these threads of volatile musical intuition and ingenuity are shaped into a ragged and compelling noise, one that favors innate inspiration over any sort of belabored correctness. Experimental in approach and execution, King Ropes blurs the lines between seemingly conflicting tones and aesthetics – the result of a life spent absorbing countless musical histories and the ways in which sounds and songs work. King Ropes incorporates the spark and genius of artists as varied as the Pixies, The Velvet Underground and Willie Nelson into a singular perspective without sacrificing the distinctiveness of those separate voices.
The LP was produced by Hollier and recorded, mixed, and Mastered by Chuck Goodwin at Sinik Sound in Bozeman, MT. Enough of the band is Montana boys to ensure that tangents will never stray too far from that home soil, but a shitload of other influences at play leave plenty of opportunity for Hollier’s eclectic vision. Hollier has accumulated a group of artists whose penchant for musical eclecticism matches his own and whose nebulous musical ideologies play in perfect complement to Hollier’s.
Gravity and Friction’s 8 tracks build on the genre-less aesthetic that defines the band. From the rural shuffle and strings of opener, “Saint Peter,” to the twang and release of closing song “These Days,” the album explores a collection of transient melodies, dirge-like arrangements and wild guitar freak-outs – not to mention detours into spoken word experimentalism and swampy psychobilly impulses. The title track tromps and surges in a looping mass of atmospheric roots rock while “Mouthful of Bees” sounds like Crazy Horse tackling songs from Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted.
There’s little consideration given to adhering to a set framework, not that the band has ever been interested in such things (read: given a shit). The record feels detached from any sense of current fashion or trending production – it’s raw and unencumbered in its emotional timbre. Guided by Hollier, the music merges its disparate influences into an expansive and organically evolved sonic vision. Despite the often loose and open nature of the music, the band never falters in its focus, never surrenders momentum to wallow in unnecessary tangents. When they do happen upon something that takes them off-track, it feels essential to the foundation of what they’re constructing. Hollier has spent decades learning how to manage the movements of dozens of musical filaments, and with Gravity and Friction, King Ropes is able to maintain a balance between the simmering pandemonium of their influences and the grounded realities of personal experiences which have irrevocably shaped them.
King Ropes
Gravity and Friction
Big And Just Little Records
July 26th, 2019
1. Saint Peter
2. Butterfly Joint
3. California Stars
4. Brown
5. Mouthful of Bees
6. Gravity and Friction
7. Giacomo’s Assistant
8. These Days