Spooky025

King Daddy - 'Evil Love'

   

DB - Adelaide

Over ripe, oozing with sin and a dozen filthy metaphors to a soundtrack of gutter grooving rock, 'Evil Love' has been a long time coming. It is the first long player for local quartet King Daddy, who have been playing about Adelaide and the eastern states for the best part of ten years. If you have never seen them, this keenly awaited debut will whet your appetite for their brand of primordial rock'n'roll, and if you have had the dark pleasure, 'Evil Love' provides a take home arsenal of their live classics plus a few more. Running to 14 songs, the release comes in time for King Daddy's inaugural Big Day Out performance this year, where it is certain they will convert many unsuspecting young things to their sordid ways, as they have done promoting the album recently.

'Evil Love' opens with a shrieking bustle of 60's guitar and theremin laced madness in Internal Combustion, followed by the naked depravity of Click. She momentarily evokes Patti Smith in amongst the garage chaos until the chorus which comes on like a warped power ballad, while Fox In The Hen House is a fantastic amped up blues stalker. The schizoid stomp For The Love Of Ivy closes the album and features the lap steel playing of Spooky label mate and Beast of Bourbon Spencer P Jones, adding extra swing and style to the live favourite.

Fronted by natural performer Nazz, responsible for most vocals and on stage gyrations, a certain unhinged gravitas is added by the occasional gravel howls from drummer Pange on Lift My Lid and the wild western Man With No Name, King Daddy are unlike much else in this square mile town. Recorded at Melbourne's Atlantis studio, 'Evil Love' sounds, as it should, live, primitive and raw, like inviting the dark side in.

Narelle Walker