Wasteland  –  King Brothers (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Here’s a question for you. If a truck carrying a back catalogue of 50’s rock’n’roll and blues records heading west at 60 miles per hour collided with a truck carrying 60’s garage rock and later punk records heading east travelling at 45 miles per hour, what noise would be forthcoming at the point of impact? Okay, rhetorical question. Silly question. Here’s another one. How can a band repackaging the most familiar rock ’n’roll vibes sound like the freshest sonic dish of the day? Only the gods of music know, well, them and King Brothers.

Wasteland doesn’t pretend to offer any answers, it’s just music not philosophy, but it does make for something great to put on in the back ground whilst you think about it. Eleven tracks that wander the back streets of all of those aforementioned genres mixing and matching, plundering and polishing, reinventing and repackaging, its all familiar stuff but at the same time feels very much of the here and now rather than a mere nostalgic wander through past glories.

And proof of how great the music is comes from the fact that they sing in Japanese, and why not, but it is a language I’m not familiar with and I get about three songs in before I even realise that I’m not listening  to the words. I’m listening to the sound of the words, the attitude, the way the delivery fits the music but like I say, this is rock’n’roll it just has to sound the part, it has to groove, rock out, swagger, sulk, threaten, look cool and get the job done. Wasteland does all this and more.