Have We Surfed This Wave Before?
A review of The King Khan & BBQ Show’s Bad News Boys
By Steve Knapp

Garage punk. Garage rock. Surf punk. Good ol’ rock n’ roll. However you want to label it, The King Khan & BBQ Show is back and giving listeners a schooling in the deep archives of rock, but how interesting is the lesson they’re selling?

The duo consisting of King Khan and BBQ (Mark Sultan) have been in musical cahoots for a while now (roughly 20 years), bringing their unique brand of garage rock into 2015 with Bad News Boys. This time around they pound out track after track with their stripped down (even for the genre) sound, but the problem is they’re aren’t making any new dents with each doo-wop laden strike. Instead, they’re retreading tires they already burned doing wheelies long ago on their previous releases.

If you’re looking for their trademark energy, the album comes out swinging with AloneAgain and Illuminations. These tracks feature some of the catchiest progressions on the album, giving listeners hope that it’s another step forward for the band, but it seems to flat line and plateau from there on. That’s not to say this isn’t a fun album to listen to, it simply feels as though they thought their last release, Invisible Girl, went a little too far ahead of where they wanted to be, so now it’s time to dial it back down.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/182300216″ /]

While there is no questioning the duo’s passion and bombastic presence, Bad News Boys just doesn’t feel as full as 2012’s Invisible Girl, which wouldn’t necessarily be a negative but it also fails to achieve the rawness that was injected into the releases before that. It does tread close with tracks like D.F.O. and Zen Machines, but they seem woefully out of place amongst the formulaic throwbacks that make up a bulk of the record. And while recording styles don’t have to make or break an album, it is the flavoring sprinkled on top to complete the dish, a dish that in this case comes out well done when what we really were hoping for was rare.

Bad News Boys isn’t a bad addition to the band’s discography, but it’s also not great; it’s just sort of there. If you have any of their prior offerings, then you’ve already heard this album. That shouldn’t deter you from picking it up, but it should warn you that you’re just going to be getting more of the same.

Score: 2.5/5