Garage rock is the natural musical manifestation of a room where junk is collected and neglected, where the floors are stained with grease spots, and where plugging in always carries the thrill of pissing off your parents as they try to sleep upstairs. It is by nature a closed-off, confining space, impervious to external influence and the passage of time. And there’s only so long you can wallow in its gas-rag stench before you start choking on the fumes.
The garage has been Kyle Thomas’ spiritual home for the past 10 years, where he’s revved up the flame-job Camaro of his dreams and gotten high off the exhaust. Over the course of four albums as King Tuff, he’s smeared ’60s garage rock into ’70s glam and ’80s rock sleaze until it turns into bubblegum, all while cultivating a party-hard persona that’s made him something of an Andrew W.K. posi-vibes guru for the Burger Records set. But over time, the garage has started to feel more like a prison: after touring behind 2014’s Black Moon Spell, Thomas was starting to fear for his health—physically, mentally, and creatively. So, on his first album in four years, he’s flipped up the proverbial sun visor, hit the button on his clip-on garage-door opener, and peeled out for parts unknown.
With Black Moon Spell, Thomas pushed his garage-glam amalgam as far as it could go without sacrificing his essential dirtbagitude and cheeky charm, by applying liberal dollops of lip gloss and mascara to give it a greater shine, but not enough to cover up the greasy stubble. In one sense, The Other is a logical extension of its predecessor’s more lustrous moments, like the jangly acoustic outlier “Eyes of the Muse” and the stargazing ballad “Staircase of Diamonds.” But the execution here is more sophisticated—and the overall tone far more serious. Within its first 10 seconds, The Other has already established itself as such a different beast from what’s come before, you almost wonder why Thomas didn’t just retire the King Tuff name entirely along with his penchant for cartoon cover art.
Nothing announces an artist’s maturation quite like a waft of wind chimes. That sound eases you into The Other’s opening title track, whose dulcet organ tones provide a suitably melancholy backdrop for Thomas’ confessional lyrics about bottoming out and finding the will to carry on. It’s the sort of atmospheric vignette that would be highly effective as a two-minute scene-setter… but it goes on for three times as long as that, subtly layering additional textures yet never quite building up to the big emotional payoff suggested by its epic proportions. Beyond introducing the album’s overarching themes of pain and perseverance, the song also proves emblematic of a record that’s always reaching for the stars, yet sometimes strains too hard to get there.
With The Other, Thomas has arrived at the same point Bowie did with Diamond Dogs, or Alice Cooper with Welcome to My Nightmare, where the campy hijinks old have given way to more worldly apocalyptic concerns. On his previous records, Thomas seemed concerned with little more than chasing girls, getting fucked up, and listening to records; here, he’s preoccupied with death, environmental degradation, and technological dependency. And the record’s ostentatious touches—brass, funk grooves, sci-fi synths—only serve to tease out a more sinister energy. Certainly, the horn-powered voodoo rhythms of “Neverending Sunshine,” “Psycho Star,” and “Raindrop Blue” blast open uncharted territory for Thomas to roam. But they forsake his melodic songwriting gifts in favor of a more plainspoken theatrical exposition, with Thomas devoting so much energy to loading up his narrative verses with mystical metaphors that he has little left for the half-cooked chorus chants. And where his previous records were always delivered with a smirk that could sell you on the goofiest throwaway lyric, Thomas delivers his heavy-handed treatises with all the subtlety of a protest placard— on the stern folk-rock parable “Circuits in the Sand,” he essentially comes up with a smartphone-era answer to Aquarian-age rants like Five Man Electrical Band’s “Signs.”
Fitting for an album born of an existential crisis, The Other resonates best when it wades into more personal terrain. On the poignant “Thru the Cracks,” Thomas delivers a cosmic country-rock elegy for a departed friend with a luminous guest-vocal assist from Jenny Lewis, while “Infinite Mile” broaches the album’s grave topical concerns from a more playful perspective, fusing a ’65-Dylan ramble to a swaggering ’70s-Who acoustic groove. And if The Other shows that Thomas’ evolution from slack stoner to conscientious art-rock oracle has not come without growing pains, he makes good on the album’s magisterial promise with the closing “No Man’s Land.”
The song serves as a bookend echo of The Other’s title-track opener, revisiting similar themes of loneliness and disillusionment, but Thomas finds solace in its gorgeous celestial sweep, and braces for the great unknown with a smile on his face. “Someday maybe you’ll find me like a wild Santa Claus,” he sings, “in a tin-foil hat, talking on a disconnected telephone.” King Tuff, the non-stop party machine, may be gone, but he’s been replaced with someone even more off the hook.
