Album of the Week: King Post Kitsch – The Party’s Over
It’s been rather quiet over at Song, by Toad towers in recent months, at least in terms of record releases.
Thankfully this month sees them hop back into action with the debut long player by King Post Kitsch, an exiled Glaswegian based in London who goes by the preposterous name of ’Charlie Ward’ by day.
Unlike a lot of previous Toad releases we’ve come across, The Party’s Over deals less with downbeat folky sounds and is something of a garage rocker.
Don’t You Touch My Fucking Honeytone is a scratchy slab of lo-fi guitar that would have been written about the album being recorded entirely on an ickle little Honeytone amp, if it weren’t for the fact that the title has no relevance to the lyrics.
No matter, the thought’s certainly there. Marc Riley’s a fan too with opening track Portland St (Pt 2) having being played on his peerless 6 Music show a few times now.
Such national exposure is always welcome for ‘less famous’ acts such as KPK. It’s not always deserved, but we’re happy to add our name to the swelling list of endorsements
There are 10 tunes here, powered through in barely half an hour, but there’s plenty to enjoy. There’s a sense of nagging but pleasurable familiarity to the likes of Brick and Bones and Walking on Eggshells, with the precise drumbeat of the latter suggesting the song’s protagonist is doing anything but.
There’s subtler, more laid back fare interspersed with the uptempo tunes too, but we’re particularly drawn to Portland St (Pt 1), the tone of which nicely dovetails with the album title.
It could comfortably soundtrack a frustrated attempt to sweep up party-related debris the morning after. Its off kilter piano and obtuse guitar perfectly represent the exhausted woozy head of someone who’d rather be in bed than chipping dried vomit off an antique coffee table.
A quote for the press release surely? Anyway, we spoke to this Charlie fellow last week…
Are you excited to get the record out?
Yeah it’s nice to see the release date finally approaching. There’s always a burst of excitement when I finish something I’m happy with, followed by a lull when you realise it won’t actually be released for a while. So it’s good to get it out there.
How the hell does a man record an album on such a wee guitar amp??
It wasn’t really through necessity as I had a decent amp at the time. I just tried it on Portland Street and it worked really well. Then once I heard it in the context of a mix I forgot what size it was. The microphone was comfortably bigger than the amp though, which looked a bit ridiculous sometimes.
Can we expect to see you out on the road soon?
Yeah, things are looking promising on that front (I don’t want to jinx it), but I’ll hopefully be out playing soon.
Finally, what the hell’s with the name? You’re neither kitsch, a post and I somehow doubt you’re royalty…
I’m sure folks have said something similar before but I genuinely did open my Penguin dictionary at three pages and those were the three words I got!
Thanks to those barely trained monkeys at Sky, Tidal Wave has very limited interweb capability this week so we can’t offer an audio stream. BUT… if you head over to Song by Toad, there’s a wee mp3 from the album to download for nowt. You can also buy the album directly from there, as well as Avalanche and other quality record emporia. Get on it.
