Album Reviews

There is two kinds of music, the good and the bad'

-Louis Armstrong

Powersolo rock like ten men, which says a lot when you consider they're a trio. It says even more when you take into account that they really don't solo at all,and that they come from that musical hinterland known as Denmark, where the closest thing to an association with rock is Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song'.

Hammer of the Gods? Hardly. These boys would rather drop the hammer in a fast car on a tight oval than wank-out a forty minute Dazed & Confused any day of the week. As long as the track is in Carolina, that's the key. Think rockabilly, blues, country,surf and punk and you may get the idea.

Think they never got that shit in the land of the Vikings? Well think again, coz' these boys do a purdy darn good job of channeling the likes of Link Wray, Johnny Cash, and Bo Diddley right on through to Flat Duo Jets and Jon Spencer like they were raised in Austin Texas, not Aarhus Denmark.

It might have been hard to plop these guys into a nice and neat genre, but fortunately I won't have to, as they've done it for me; and are you ready for this'they call it donkeypunk!

Now, while I feel that giving your band its own genre is like giving yourself a nickname (really, who does that?), I have to admit that it's pretty funny, even apt.

The lead-off quote from the great Satchmo that starts this piece has always meant a lot to me, and as such has always been the ideal, yet I'm loathe to admit that in the digital age it may be too much of an oversimplification; at least when it comes to music journalism. There's just way too much music of all kinds out there these days that both writer and reader need to know more than if it's simply good or bad, especially before we drop our hard earned shekels on some band we've never heard of before.

I was just hoping to find some middle ground between Louis and the whole 'rootsy-post-psych-space rock-Americana with a strain of Nu Metal-Prog-Electro thrown in for good measure' type of garbage I read in every music rag (I know, guilty as charged) and hear at every record store I go into. Now I don't have to, donkeypunk it is.

And what it is changes not just song to song, but sometimes within the songs themselves. Loud and lewd largely, yet sweet and introspective at times, but always with a driving propulsion that never whimpers as you work your way through thirty-five minutes of toe-tapping donkeypunk.

From the Jon Spencer-like opener, 'Baby, You Ain't Looking Right' to 'Good Behavior', a sort of updated Stray Cats rave-up, to the serenely beautiful, gently rolling ' Broken Wings,' Powersolo offer up the steely-eyed goods with conviction and a whole lotta cool.

Speaking of cool, they must be to have landed American superhero Andre 'Mr. Rhythm' Williams, who guests on a few tracks and who should be able to extinguish any doubts that these boys can play, and his work here, as good as it is, isn't even the highlight.

As is usually the case, it's the little things that really count, and everything up to this point would be just fine by me, but when they bust out the Spanish stomper 'Juanito', all hell breaks loose; complete with horns and Spanish vocals, it recalls British fluff boys A Band of Bees covering the Os Mutantes classic 'A Minha Menina', except that Poweresolo actually wrote their own. Then it's on to 'Oak Tree Girl', which sounds enough like mid-period Camper Van Beethoven to be scary, furthering the mystique of this trio tenfold, confirming they weren't content to nail rockabilly and leave it at that.

Great, but who the hell are they? Founded and fronted by a tall, waiflike gent who goes by the moniker Kim Kix, but whose real name is Kim Jeppesen, handles the vocals, strums the guitar, and occasionally picks the bass, while brother Bo, AKA Atomic Child, handles bass, guitar, lap steel, and some backing vocals. Last but not least is drummer JC Benz, whose real name makes it clear why they go for the nicknames. That's Jens Soendergaard in case you're interested.

Interested is what I hope you are, and it's interesting to note that Kim Kix sings with a world weary yet exuberant vibe that permeates the whole album, and though much of the lyrical content (not to mention the album title) is a little crude, Kix and the boys have enough self-effacing humility that you're sure they don't take themselves too seriously.

On the down side, the recording was done with so much gain that I can't turn the volume knob past 9 o'clock without my tube amp clipping like crazy (though at low levels it sounds great), but this type of music gets by on it's own insatiable energy, and any shortcomings encountered in the studio are immediately offset by the vibe put forth.

Ultimately, Powersolo are a whole lotta fun, which is a lot more than I can say about a lot of what I hear lately, and fun is certainly something we can all use more of. If there really is only two types of music then I've just gone on for about a thousand words too long, when all you really needed to know is that Powersolo are good.