Better get this one out of the way straight away; if like me, you were wondering where you heard the name ‘Arch Stanton’ before, it’s the grave name where the treasure is buried in ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.’ Sad film geeks like me will get it pretty much immediately, but a friend who saw the name come up on the player was agonising for some time before I put them out their misery. On with the music. If you’re not familiar with them, Karma To Burn, or “K2B” as some know them, have been going for two decades now, and are one of the pioneers of the Desert Rock sound, although assorted contractual issues, and an uncompromising approach to a minimalistic and predominantly instrumental sound has meant they never scaled the heights of such contemporaries as Kyuss. With a history of personnel and label changes behind them, this year sees them releasing a follow on to 2011’s ‘V’, the band now stripped down to a vocalist free three piece. Interested? Read on.
‘Fifty Seven’ opens the album with a stripped back punk stamp, the bounce of the drums immediately calling to my mind the sound of Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’, complete with rumbling strummed bass, all stacking up nicely against some sneering guitar riffs in a tidy four minute package. ‘Fifty Six’ follows, with a heavier guitar sound dominating, the succeeding ‘Fifty Three’ having a more laid back stoner sound, but rather than an extended jam that you’d normally expect from the intro, the tempo ups and the track positively races past before the countrified sliding guitar riffs that mosey out of the speakers for ‘Fifty Four’.
Everything about the album stripped down and a testament to minimalism. Track names are merely numbers, and it is only with the samples from the aforementioned film on closer ‘Fifty Nine’ that you get any vocals as the late Eli Wallach as Tuco screams his immortal line “Hey Blond, you know what you are? Just a dirty son of a…….!”, before the darkness of the Spaghetti Western classic is recreated in musical form. Nowhere in the entire album is there a flashy solo, or the unnecessary presence of overly intrusive engineering and polishing, the eight tracks coming together in barely 40 minutes of hard rock riffing. In the past Karma To Burn has flaunted with vocals, the presence of a vocalist once being a stipulation of a record company contract, if legend is to be believed. Now the band simply blasts out their music with a cocksure “take it or leave it” swagger, and for that self-assured attitude, the band deserves praise.
(7/10 Spenny)
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