K-Holes

The K-Holes speak at once of the mystic and the cosmopolitan, the primal and urbane, the earthen and its synthesized cousins. But unlike their contemporaries, theirs is not a sound of the grinning, gregarious panderer. Nor is it one of the bored or at-ease. Rather, it’s one of escape. Escape from the concrete scrabble of New York, that moneyed parking lot for the cynical and privileged; escape from the vulgar materialism sung from the metropolitan mouth; escape from the vacuous r’n’r pantomime that promises mere vaudevillian entertainment in any number of the city’s myriad dives. No, the K-Holes set these things afire, and in their stead, they proffer a wet hand, leading you, the wanton listener, down a path to another flame, a funereal white-hot pyre – one that promises more than sheer cleansing nihilism. One that promises freedom amongst cages of different shapes, sizes and colors. A way out. Their abdication follows a natural extension of the atrophied rock/roll ligament – unfurling from H. Williams to G. Vincent to Larry & the Blue Notes to the Pagans, Birthday Party, Flesh Eaters, Scientists, beyond – colored, at times, with ethereal smudges of primitive ceremony. As we follow their trajectory, running from the towering urban oppression, we hear whiffs of guttural noir in the honk of the sax, we hear the frustrated yelp in the guitar, we sense the bite and lust in their gang vocal. It’s fueled, all the while, by a thundering beat of tribal divination. Their burghal séance urges us onward, upward, and we sense the fire nearing all the while. But the heat emanates not from the flame to which we run. It flowers from the pyre that has devoured us from the inside all along: the one that burns us up and tells us to move – in any direction at all, in any way we see fit, consequences be damned. The K-Holes didn’t put the fire there. But we sincerely thank them for finding and fueling it. -Eric Cecil