Before Steven Spielberg’s life became consumed with oversized battle bots and nuking fridges, he was part of a modest little enterprise known as Indiana Jones. There was without fail in every film a shot of a map with a little red line scraping across the surface, showing our hero’s progress across the globe.
Enter Kay Kay and his Weathered Underground, who are playing their own version of globetrotting. Their latest album, aptly titled Studio Album, is all over the musical map. It’s indie. It’s shoegazer. It’s reggae. It’s psychedelic pop. It’s grungy drinking music. It’s the Beatles with Wayne Cohen and Bob Marley. And while this kind of non-direct direction usually means a band hasn’t come together with a solid sound, with Kay Kay, it just means they want to explore the globe a little.
The album opens with “Hey Momma,” boasting an uncanny Matt Costa sound, but with teeth. Lyrics and movement feel a bit darker, more jaded than the happy-go-lucky feel the crooner of “Mr. Pitiful” provides. Happy little strumming of guitars is doubled over with the addition of soft-shoeing sounds, twittering (note: not like computers. Don’t lie, your mind went there) piano, drums and warbling horns. It feels almost 1920s in its construction before dropping abruptly into a well of Rastafarian Reggae beats. It halts itself, redirects and restarts with a countdown and a brass trumpet squalling. While that might seem like a weird mix, that kind of combo is the standard of this album.
“Bowie the Desert Pea” presents an audible shift in time. The heavy beats, the generous use of bass; this almost has an Isacc Hayes booty jam a la the 1970s feel to it. Or, example option b, Flight of the Conchords pretending to be Isacc Hayes. Vocals are distorted, and by the second half of the album has dipped down into a psychedelic rock sound with crunchier guitar before stripping down at its apex and topping off with all the flair of the Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper years. (Seriously, the guy sounds dangerously similar to McCartney). Horns drift in to carry the song out, furthering its Beatles cred.
Then “Santa Cruz Lined Pockets” moves in so seamlessly behind is predecessor you might not even notice the switch. This one lends itself completely to the psychedelic rock category, which you automatically qualify for if you use sitars prominently and you don’t work in Bollywood. Vocals overlap and echo around a haze of other instruments all meshing together in a kaleidoscope of soundscapes. The occasional organ gets touted above the rest of the music-makers.
Then we have the Ode to the Beatles, otherwise titled “Blood Stone Goddess.” It begins with a similar promenade of brass and dramatic drums before dropping into a more modern feel with contemporary riffs. The brass mixes back in. It’s a melding of the old and new, tempering sounds together. The tempo then drops off, and the vocals become falsetto (when did Coldplay get here?) before pausing and wrenching the gears in another direction, restarting with shimmying tambourines and warbling organ notes. Then it drops yet again and restarts with a piano solo, before merging into a similar Beatles feel again and a very McCartney-esque squall-singing cry. Then when you think a song can’t reinvent itself anymore, this thing drifts into a somewhat reggae sound, with heavily distorted vocals before falling off into nothingness.
“All Alone,” the album’s last audible, sounds like something straight from a honky tonk. The intro features crunchy, distorted guitars, pianos being swept by slightly boozy hands, drums pounded with exuberance, all bolstering by barroom whoops and hollers. This all gets watered down when the lyrics start, and the slightly raspy, noticeably distorted voicework plays over more classical indie rock; sounds that lean more towards ambient with touches of orchestral instruments twined with guitars. The song flips back into the bar-room feel, back to indie, followed by a moment of orchestral prowess, then something that sounds like it came from Santana’s closet, before a crescendo that drops most the climbing instruments coldly, leaving a crashing piano, gritty overlapped vocals, heavy drums, and a 80s-tastic guitar riff. The song ends on soft notes, shifting back into more ambient, hopeful sounds, with a happy little flute lilting among drifting brass and violins.
The journey from one end of this album to the other is full of sudden switches, unscheduled turns, and unexplainable winding roads. To the random ear this may seem haphazard, but Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground have in reality crafted a magically rich, engaging trip through more than just their songs, but through genres and their obvious prowess at many of them. Let’s hope they have many more excursions in mind.
Artist:
www.kaykayandhisweatheredunderground.com
