Returning after a five-year absence, armed with Buncha Beans' goofy hee-haw party-rock, King Kong are showing more stamina than I could've ever imagined. I first caught the Louisville group in the early 1990s while "working" as a college radio DJ. I didn't care much for chuckles in my music, but Ethan Buckler's Calvin Johnson-meets-Fred Schneider monotone on Old Man on the Bridge struck me as wonderfully weird. Fifteen or so years after that Homestead debut? Well, big ups for stamina.
Back then, something I'd zeroed in on and relished was that Buckler had been Slint's original late-80s bassist (he'd departed after recording Tweez). I was obsessed with everything Slint, so around the same time, in 1993, I was also keen on that fact that another Drag City act, Will Oldham, had taken the cover photo for Spiderland, but put out a collection of creaky, melancholic mountain music, There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You.
Seems insane now, but there were legitimate "late-night debates" about authenticity, whether or not Oldham was shitting us with a sort of yokel punch line (one dude getting teary to "I Tried To Stay Healthy For You"). Of course, turns out Oldham wasn't fucking with us. I mention this because in his transition from Slint bassist to B-52-style chanty ringleader, Buckler wasn't fucking with us either-- though his honesty is much less satisfying than Oldham's. What sounded fresh and unhinged in 1992 comes off here as pretty darn stale.
Buncha Beans is a return to King Kong's traditional sound following 2002's The Big Bang, which found the band incorporating more electro accents. The band's albums usually center on a specific theme; this one has an arc of animal stories involving cockroaches, monkeys, a "funky mule" (uh-oh), elephants, hippos, zebras, kangaroos, and, among others, a "bald-headed" eagle and pack of caribous watching steamrollers, bulldozers, and billions of people. Yeah, it's a critique of modern society, of us.
Silly as the songs are and as half-baked as the critique comes off, King Kong often finds pretty fun grooves, like the up-beat, surfer-moseying "Bulldozers" or the disco high-hat swiveling "Bug Make". The storyline of the latter? You smash a bug, wonder "what difference does a bug make?" Cue the war/modernization theme and Kafka. Being "tough in the city" (or universe) comes up again on "Tough Guys", where Buckler's joined by a female vocalist for a sorta rising last-dance/prom-theme/Banana Splits/slow-mo Shaft anthem. Really. He ends the song-- over six minutes later-- with a spoken list of toughs, including my favorite, "Sloped Forehead Ted." What ties 'em together? Well, they know that "cigarettes are not enough" and "they're all dead." Yikes.
A pattern's developed over time and the album's title track follows a standard King Kong method of introducing a simple theme, maxim, or well-worn cliché, and then tweaking it with a play on words or subversive inversion. In this case, a bunch of beans come in various colors with different, shapes, dispositions, and fates. Some watch porno. Many create alienating societies. He doesn't mention it, but I'm guessing some even write record reviews for Pitchfork. Eventually, pulling a Walt Whitman, Buckler hits us with "I'm a can of beans." As with most of the record, this a-ha's cute, but doesn't add up to a hill of...
