KING KONG, UZ JSME DOMA 12/5, LOUNGE AX We here in America tend to equate traditionalism with sincerity and the avant-garde with cold, calculating intellectualism. But for Czech bands like Uz Jsme Doma, subsisting for years on smuggled Frank Zappa and Residents, to break musical taboos is still truly gutsy, even revolutionary. On its Fairy-Tales From Needland, recently reissued in the U.S. by the D.C. label Skoda, the quintet has created a concept album based on, as lyricist Miroslav Wanek explains, “trying to imagine what it would be like 600 or 700 years from now when people would tell fairy tales based on our experience.” The result is a hyperactive maelstrom of sheer joyful sound, with jazzlike sax bursts and beautiful Slavic choruses rising out of a Pere Ubu-like chug. I missed the band’s last American tour, but reportedly this album comes closer than the previous three to capturing the energy of its live shows. If that’s true, funky Louisville goofballs King Kong, whose recent Kingdom of Kong (Drag City) includes profundities like “Floor, Door, I Don’t Wanna Party Anymore” and a thin rant about Ronald McDonald, could end up looking even sillier than intended.
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SHELTER 12/6, FIRESIDE BOWL Not your typical hardcore coming-of-age story: in 1988, after rising to cult fame as leader of New York straightedge punks Youth of Today, Ray Cappo realized there might be more to life than teetotaling and militant vegetarianism and turned to…Krishna? I myself see Shiva as the most punk rock of the Hindu gods, but I guess he’s not positive enough. Sadly, Cappo’s current outfit, Shelter, which also includes YOT guitarist John Porcell, has been blessed with strictly average pop-punk skills–and sorry, but in the whole of hardcore nobody but the Bad Brains’ H.R. has ever been able to get away with lines even remotely like “Austerity without humility–our source of ruination.”
