Garage rock is the natural musical manifestation of a room where junk is collected and omitted. The floors are stained with grease spots, and wherein plugging in always incorporates the thrill of pissing off your dad and mom as they are trying to sleep upstairs. By nature, it is a clo,sed-off, confining area impervious to external effects passage of time. And there’s the best goodbye you may wallow in its gas-rag stench before you start choking on the fumes.
The garage has been Kyle Thomas’s non secular home for the past ten years, in which he’s revved up the flame-process Camaro of his goals and gotten high off the exhaust. Throughout four albums as King Tuff, he’s smeared ’60s garage rock into ’70s glam, and ’80s rock sleaze until it becomes bubblegum, all at the same time as cultivating a party-difficult character that’s made him something of an Andrew W.K. Posi-vibes guru for the Burger Records set. But through the years, the storage has commenced experiencing extra like a prison: after touring in the back of 2014’s Black Moon Spell, Thomas started to fear for his fitness—bodily, mentally, and creatively. So, on his first album in 4 years, he’s flipped up the proverbial sun visor, hit the button on his clip-on storage door opener, and peeled out for parts unknown.
With Black Moon Spell, Thomas pushed his garage-glam amalgam as some distance as it could move without sacrificing his critical dirtbagitude and cheeky attraction by applying liberal dollops of lip gloss and mascara to present it an extra shine, but now not sufficient to cowl up the greasy stubble. In one experience, The Other is a logical extension of its predecessor’s lustrous moments, just like the jangly acoustic outlier “Eyes of the Muse” and the stargazing ballad “Staircase of Diamonds.” But the execution here is more sophisticated, and the general tone is serious. Within its first 10 seconds, The Other has already hooked up itself as any such extraordinary beast from what’s come earlier; you are nearly surprised why Thomas didn’t simply retire King Tuff’s call entirely alongside along enchant for caricature cover art.
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Nothing announces an artist’s maturation quite like a waft of wind chimes. That sound eases you into The Other’s commencing identify the tune, whose dulcet organ tones offer a suitable despair backdrop for Thomas’s confessional lyrics, approximately bottoming out and locating the need to hold on. It’s the form of an atmospheric vignette that might be incredibly powerful as a two-minute scene-setter… but it is going on for three instances as long as that, subtly layering additional textures but in no way pretty constructing as much as the huge emotional payoff suggested using its epic proportions. Beyond introducing the album’s overarching subject matters of pain and perseverance, the music also proves emblematic of a document that’s always achieving for the celebs, but now and again traces too tough to get there.
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With The Other, Thomas has arrived at the identical factor Bowie did with Diamond Dogs, or Alice Cooper with Welcome to My Nightmare, where the campy hijinks old have given way to more worldly apocalyptic worries. On his previous information, Thomas seemed worried with little extra than chasing women, getting fucked up, and listening to statistics; right here, he’s preoccupied with dying, environmental degradation, and technological dependency. And the report’s ostentatious touches—brass, funk grooves, sci-fi synths—only tease out greater sinister electricity.
Certainly, the horn-powered voodoo rhythms of “Neverending Sunshine,” “Psycho Star,” and “Raindrop Blue” blast open uncharted territory for Thomas to roam. But they forsake his melodic songwriting gifts for an extra plainspoken theatrical exposition. Thomas devotes so much power to loading his narrative verses with mystical metaphors that he has little left for the half-of-cooked refrain chants. And wherein his previous facts were usually brought with a smirk that might promote you at the goofiest throwaway lyric, Thomas can provide his heavy-exceeded treatises with all of the subtlety of a protest placard— on the stern folks-rock parable “Circuits in the Sand,” he essentially comes up with a telephone-generation solution to Aquarian-age rants like Five Man Electrical Band’s “Signs.”
Fitting for an album born of an existential crisis, The Other resonates excellently while it wades into extra personal terrain. On the poignant “Thru the Cracks,” Thomas promises cosmic United States of America rock elegy for a departed friend with a luminous visitor and vocal help from Jenny Lewis. At the same time, “Infinite Mile” broaches the album’s grave topical issues from a more playful angle, fusing a 65-Dylan ramble to a swaggering’ 70s-Who acoustic groove. And if The Other shows that Thomas’ evolution from slack stoner to conscientious artwork-rock oracle has no longer come without growing pains, he makes proper at the album’s magisterial promise with the remaining “No Man’s Land.”
The song serves as a bookend echo of The Other’s title-track opener, revisiting comparable themes of loneliness and disillusionment. However, Thomas unearths solace in its fabulous celestial sweep and braces for the splendid unknown with a smile. “Someday perhaps you’ll discover me like a wild Santa Claus,” he sings, “in a tin-foil hat, talking on a disconnected telephone.” King Tuff, the non-forestall party device, can be long gone. However, he’s been changed with someone even greater off the hook.
