Atlanta garage punk Greg King aka GG King went back in the studio this past year and is now back in your ears with his latest LP, Remain Intact. For this latest endeavor he’s assembled his pales and oft accomplices, ax-men Josh Feigert and Mike Koechlin, bassist brandisher Ryan Bell, and skin-thumper Tyler Kinney, to recapture the slightly sour, darkly toned rollick and roll that we’ve come to rely on King for. And yes, the band still sounds like they should be opening for the Wipers in an LA club whose ceiling is always leaking, even days after it last rained.
I can’t really speculate on every word and passage of Remain Intact, but the overarching theme appears to be an examination of all of the things that help someone keep their brain from coming unglued and spilling out in all directions like a bouquet of wet spaghetti. We live in a crazy world, and it would seem only natural to have to be crazy to want to live in it. But if you’re going to keep your soul and your sanity intact, your going to need a lot of friends, a sense of purpose and history, and at least one afternoon a week to smoke on your porch and listen to records while thinking about nothing in particular. This is the GG King code. Live by it and providence will be yours!
A good place to start with Remain Intact is the title track which wiggles and rumbles in a careless, head-swiveling manner that is reminiscent of the way that Mission to Burma would often weave between hooks and cracks of guitar fire, with the band sounding as ready to entertain as they are prepared to serve up a straight shot of something that will burn the whole way down to the pit of your stomach. “Melt on You” has a similarly melodic mindest, digging deep into the soil of the heart to retrieve gems from the pressure chambers of devotion. While a blistering sense of melodicism is an ever-present and constituent aspect of the band’s sound, so is a noisy proclivity towards obfuscation. While it’s always tempting to want to make low-energy comparisons to the Dickies and the Weirdos, whatever you can find of more traditional garage rock in GG’s sound is always amplified by flamed-out Flipper compunctions and saturated with Sonic Youth-esque amp abuse. You can even find a bit of a Digital Leather homage on the haunted midnight-shrouded stepper “Mephistic Redux” and on the latter half of “Epoch Rock.”
GG King’s latest LP will satisfy the weirdo rocker in you and give that inner numbskull a reason to stagger through another cursed day in this dark timeline. You can stream the entirety of Remain Intact below via Bandcamp:
Get Remain Intact on vinyl from Total Punk Records here.
