Maybe it was a case of absence making hearts grow fonder.
King’s X hasn’t released a new studio album in eight years. However, that lack of fresh material didn’t dim the fervor for those in attendance at Shank Hall Monday night to see the Texan power trio with a penchant for nearly Beatles-esque vocal harmonies. The venue may have been closer to its fire capacity on other occasions, but the crowd’s nigh-reverential appreciation could well have threatened to burst the door off by the end of the band’s 15 songs.
Acts far more popular in terms of music and ticket sales aren’t apt to get fans to proclaim on the street to no one in particular that they witnessed the greatest band in the world. And if what you want out of a band is a uniquely melodic, thunderingly heavy and often technically flabbergasting take on philosophically diverse hard rock, with the aforementioned harmonic sweetness, the fan announcing his post-show appraisal to anyone within earshot wasn’t all that hyperbolic.
Lead singing bassist Doug Pinnick admitted that he and his bandmates no longer possessed the youthful vigor to assay some of their more thrash-oriented work, but only the person in the front row requesting a particularly frenetic instrumental may have been disappointed. Besides, Pinnick was more intent on running through some of his band’s simpler and starker lyrics.
Those were taken largely from King’s X’s ’80s and ’90s catalog, when they had major label backing, video budgets that easily afforded crazy special effects and, oddly in retrospect, a push from their management into the Christian rock subculture. That latter factor became complicated after Pinnick came out as gay in the late ’90s, so his homosexuality now lends a different subtext to songs such as “Dogman” and “A Box.” Regardless, the doubts he may now have about the faith he once embraced, his profanity-laden rant about the evil humanity never seems to unlearn during “Over My Head,” a song about his grandmother singing and praying over him as a child, lacked a certainty of context for those who know the group's history.
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Whatever anyone in attendance thought of Pinnick’s philosophizing, at least as many in attendance were there for the instrumental interplay. Both Pinnick and guitarist Ty Tabor emitted thick, fuzzy tones from their respective axes, especially effective during those times they extended songs into jams built upon tensions and releases akin to deconstruction and reversal of the loud/quiet/loud dynamic associated with grunge (and weren’t Nirvana a kind of power trio, too?). Drummer Jerry Gaskill provided the skeleton onto which the other two’s tonal poetry was tautly framed, managing behind his fairly minimal kit what Rush’s Neil Peart might require a gargantuan phalanx of percussion instruments to make a spectacle of virtuosity. Nothing wrong with virtuoso spectacle, but Gaskill’s judicious economy of approach provides an asset to make King’s X greater than the sum of its parts.
One fan told me that seeing King’s X through the years has turned him on to many of their opening acts. Kings of Spade may be another that works for him. Fluorescent red-mohawked vocalist Kasi Nunes may be on the way to perfecting a kind of heavy music/R&B torch-song style. She may implement it best over music that resembles what metal ballads may sound like, but sassier disco and funk grooves with the bite of hard guitar suit her too.
