About seven million rock tunes about broken relationships-that’s not a dig. Humanity has been trying to hurt the ones we love for a good several thousand years and rock just brought it to scale. In truth, the real challenge isn’t finding fresh angles to sound off to about the pain, but making an audience care enough to listen. If you’re are in luck, Kings County do know that.
Their new song, “What Now“, seemingly has a straightforward thought at its center – the point when it all explodes. Not the “breaking up,” or the “screaming fight,” or even the “actors running through the airport” scene (you know what I mean). Rather, it is the focus on what comes after the elevator doors close on that “difficult emotional space, full of uncertainty and suspended emotion” where you’ve just caught your breath and are wondering how on earth to begin again. Today’s song.
Yes, there’s frustration. Yes, there’s regret. But beneath all of that is something more useful: movement. The song feels less like somebody collapsing and more like somebody standing in the wreckage trying to figure out where the exits are. It’s a song about uncertainty rather than defeat.
Musically, the band does exactly what a band like Kings County should be doing. Big guitars. Big hooks. Big choruses. No unnecessary complications and I mean that as a compliment.
A surprising number of modern rock bands seem to believe complexity automatically equals depth. Meanwhile Kings County are operating on a much older principle: if people can’t remember the chorus after one listen, you’ve probably overthought it.
You can still make out influences of the band everywhere. We haven’t dropped the emphasis on melodies like The Beatles would have wanted, and the overwhelming power of Arena Rock of the 1970’s goes without saying. The guitars are punchy, and the drums- propellor everything along, and the chorus rocks up just in time, enough momentum to take the singer’s own angsty discontent and make it a shared thing.
The sound production, by Chuck Alkazian at Pearl Sound Studios, provides the right amount of shine and sheen, but not over-polished and deadening to the impact. It all sounds large, but not sterilized. I know it sounded powerful, but still lived as real people.
The Orlando quartet aren’t trying to reinvent rock music with this. They’re actually just trying to write a tune people can relate to. And that can sometimes be an extremely difficult thing to do. “What Now” hits a home run because it just accepts that the heartache isn’t the story. It just begins after.
And for four minutes, Kings County brings that murkiness into unexpectedly positive relief.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
