King Creeper // Adore the Chaos // Album Review

King Creeper release their debut album Adore the Chaos on Friday 23rd February, with an album launch gig slated to take place a week later on Friday 1st March in Voodoo, allowing a week for people to familiarise themselves with the unreleased tunes before they belt them out at the gig.

Opening track Sick Visions was released as a single in mid-December, offering a nice taster of things to come – it’s an incredible-sounding track with swirling guitars, restrained dynamics, and an explosive chorus replete with earworm, super singalong la-la-las.

The second track All My Friends Are Enemies is pure Stooges worship. Singer David McCrum channels his best young Iggy Pop vocals over the crunchy garage fuzz guitar sound that he lays down alongside lead guitarist Matt McCrum, while the rhythm section, consisting of Doutsie McCrum’s bass and Colin Riddel’s drums, lay down an infectiously foot-stomping beat that injects plenty of energy into the track. There’s a great solo too, intensified by a big drum build-up. A fantastic track, one of the highlights for sure.

Similar to the opening track, The Devil Tastes So Good is fairly restrained at times, allowing a platform for the chorus and its accompanying sing-along vocal melody to burst forth. The song is held down by a great bass hook, the definition of simple but effective.

There’s a lyric in Sex and Violence that goes, “We spend days out in the sun”, and it matches the track’s shimmering guitars which echo the rippling effect of a visible heatwave. A distinctive Eastern-style sound amplifies the effect further. The way the chorus starts as one thing and turns into another is incredibly creative and also lends itself well to the song’s ending crescendo. Another stand-out, not least in the way its actual sound is distinct from the other songs on the record.

You Can’t Stop It feels slightly less consequential than the other songs on Adore the Chaos, but it’s far from being a filler track. In fact, with nine songs slotted across a runtime of just over half an hour, the album’s pacing is quite taut; nothing is overstaying its welcome, and conversely, nothing lingers longer than it should.

Much like Sick Visions, Deathly Heart So Cold and Psychotic Distraction Baby are both reminiscent of The Black Keys and would both fit perfectly in a car advert, complete with singable guitar hooks and bouncing drum work. The latter track has a pair of stunning solos which is a great bonus.

The penultimate song Tastes Like Lightning was released as the second single in the run-up to the release of Adore the Chaos. Riddel’s bouncy drumming perfectly complements the loose swing of the guitars, giving the music an incredibly upbeat, jovial, carefree feel. However, this is in stark contrast to the song’s lyrical content, which contains lines such as “Everybody’s happy, ‘cept for me” and “The walls close in and you feel like a ghost”.

This means the song joins the ranks of happy-sounding songs that are anything but, much like Pumped Up Kicks, Bad Moon Rising, and Hey Ya!, with André 3000 observing in the latter, “Y’all don’t want to hear me, you just want to dance.” But in saying that, it absolutely cannot be denied that Dave McCrum asking, “Y’ever feel like…ever feel like…ever feel like” is catchy as fuck, in no short measure to his incredible delivery of the refrain, even if what he follows it up with isn’t so fun on paper.

The closing track Little Lover Boy is another high-energy tune – a wise way to end proceedings. There’s a great surf rock feel to it, very much in the Dick Dale sense. The track almost sounds like someone rolled a handful of songs from the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs soundtracks together into a ball, added more fuzz, and rolled it out along the open road of an American highway.

This says a lot about the album as a whole, as King Creeper make no bones about which bands and artists influence them, as the influences are clear from the get-go. But the band can amalgamate these various strands together and weave them into the more original aspects of their writing and playing, paying homage to those that inspire them, while still very much retaining their singular voice and sensibility.

This is a feat helped massively by frontman Dave McCrum’s distinctive vocals and the band’s fantastic talent when it comes to musical cohesion, itself bolstered by the stellar, pitch-perfect production and mastering by Tragic Magic Music.

Adore the Chaos is very much worth a listen. The songs will undoubtedly be a treat live, too.

Review: Mark Russell

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