Even though it's been a few years since the last Kid Congo Powers & The Pink Monkey Birds album, I'm happy to report that the group is back with a new EP this week. Swing From The Sean DeLear, out tomorrow via In The Red Records, reveals the outfit's lost none of its power, with the players here attacking some of this material like jazz mad-men.
"Sean DeLear" marches forward, a tribute to the late singer of the same name, with the chords and hooks here being nearly martial in their attack. "(Are You) Ready, Freddy?" is even better, shades of early Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds stuff shining through the ripped-up riffs and throbbing bass-lines, while "(I Can't Afford) Your Shitty Dreamhouse" is funny and acerbic. This one is more spacious, the instruments raging around a melange of percussion and feedback loops. If that cut is risky, the 14-minute closer, "He Walked In", is even looser. This one, an epic free jazz rumination inspired by Kid's dream of the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce, his bandmate in The Gun Club, is a trip. Parts of this are like Beefheart in the Eighties, and others like Sun Ra and Sonic Youth, or something. It's an elegantly disorganized track, and the sort of big swing for the fences that few undertake on an American indie record anymore. D.C. music fans take note of Mark Cisneros (Des Demonas, Hammered Hulls) on the flute on this one, and if a listener thinks of "Spill the War" by Eric Burdon and War a tiny bit, I think that might be a good thing, and something that indicates the loose power of this cut.
Swing from The Sean DeLear is out tomorrow via In The Red Records.
More details on Kid Congo Powers and the Monkey Birds via the band's Facebook page.
[Photo: David Fenster]