Acid King

Busse Woods (Man’s Ruin)
by Brian Varney

If I were Lori S., guitarist/ singer/leader of Acid King, I’d probably get tired of critics making a big deal of my being a woman in a band like Acid King. But I’m not. I’m a male and I like chicks and rock music. Although these are probably my two biggest interests, it’s also been kinda assumed that never the twain shall meet. Women, as a general rule, don’t like rock music. So to find a band this good with a woman out front is pretty rare. Even if she weren’t very good looking, she’d still be pretty hot, y’know? The fact that she’s a pretty hot-looking chick makes it all the rarer. The fact that she’s married to a Melvin (yeah, like she’d be married to anyone else) just makes it all the more hopeless for me. So let me utter a great sigh, and we’ll be done with that.

So what do Acid King sound like? Good. Very good. They squat in that squalid little piece of space where Electric Wizard are already passed out. Little to no actual songcraft happening here, but lotsa heavy riffing, grumbling low-end, and psychotic, tortured vocals for six to ten minutes at a time (six tracks, 45 minutes). Like Electric Wizard and the Melvins, this is where rock music seperates itself completely from pop tradition. There are no songs at all, just riffs. This is really art music, existing completely outside traditional pop structures. Mood and atmosphere don’t color these songs, they ARE the songs. It’s basically the stoned-out space rock of early UFO and Hawkwind brought farther down the line. More drugs, fewer brain cells. And although I don’t consider myself artsy-fartsy at all, this sounds pretty good to me. I suppose it’ll probably sound really great to all the druggies out there. Me, I’m more rocker than stoner, and Acid King satiates me just fine. It’ll probably strike your average know-it-all as an atonal roar, but play it for your neighborhood sicko and you’ll have a friend for life.
(610 22nd St. #302 San Francisco, CA 94107)