KING BLOOD - Vengeance, Man

"Second offering from KING BLOOD & its a motherfucker. Throbbing, claustrophobic, triumphant, room shaking, and chiming electric guitar worship. The type of record thatll lodge into your head & reduce your mind to a luminous toxic jelly. Enters the static void alongside Earth, Skullflower, & Les Rallizes Denudes. 320 copies." - Richie.

On KING BLOODs debut Eyewash Silver, Marc Masters at Pitchfork: "There are at least two ways to look at a guitar riff-- as a building block for a song, or as an end in itself. Ryland Wharton, aka King Blood, has taken the latter viewpoint to a mesmerizing extreme. On Eyewash Silver-- originally released in a tiny edition in 2010-- he treats fuzzy guitar riffs not simply as ends, but as mantras to be chanted and monuments to be worshiped. Each track offers one simple figure devoutly repeated, as if musical nirvana is always just one more riff away... The album drips with overload, creating a raw, gut-level immediacy. The idea behind each song is delivered unwashed and unrefined.

In that sense, Eyewash Silver reminds me of Neil Young, particularly his solo guitar soundtrack to Jim Jarmuschs 1995 existential western Dead Man. Whartons songs arent nearly as sparse or forlorn as Youngs score, but both share a near-anthropological fascination with the primal force of repeated notes. (Besides, the swinging hooks of "Poison in Jest" and "Sinfull Woman" sound extracted and extended from Crazy Horse tunes). Youll hear other reference points throughout Eyewash Silver-- the noisy wash of Japanese bands like Fushitsusha and Les Rallizes Denudes, the motor-garage of Wooden Shjips, and, on the near-perfect "End of a Primitive", the classic amp-melt of great Velvet Underground bootlegs. But I keep coming back to Young and his exploratory wanderings, a standard to which Wharton measures up well."