Arish "King" Khan and Mark "BBQ" Sultan have been partners in punk going on 20 years now, enjoying an open marriage that’s allowed them to indulge passion projects outside their relationship, secure in the knowledge they can always go home again (even as that home has changed from their native Montreal to Berlin). Alas, in the six years that have elapsed since their previous outing as the King Khan & BBQ Show, we’ve seen that even the most lax, non-committal unions can turn tense, with the duo cutting ties after a series of onstage blowups in 2010. And perhaps, not coincidentally, post-breakup, each has ventured further afield from their garage-rock base: Sultan with his eclectic double-album set Whatever I Want/Whenever I Want, Khan with Idle No More, his regal 2013 outing with long-time backing band the Shrines. Their inevitable reunion effort, Bad News Boys, thus functions as a form of couples therapy: a reminder of shared values to get them back on the same page again. And, naturally, that page is still covered in blood, spit, sweat, and other bodily fluids best left to a forensics team to verify.
While all King Khan & BBQ Show albums to date have been built from the same rudiments—Khan’s rasp, Sultan’s croon, two frayed-string guitars, and a ceaseless sleigh-belled stomp so steady, you’d swear it’s a click track—2009’s Invisible Girl saw them tightening up their songcraft and, if not totally scrub up their sound, at least attempt to squeegee the surface-layer soot. With Bad News Boys, however, the duo jump back into the deep fryer where they cooked up 2006’s extra-greasy What’s for Dinner?, the album that saw these two vets join younger comrades like Jay Reatard and the Black Lips on the frontlines of the umpteenth garage-rock revival. Recorded in Sultan’s Berlin home with just two microphones, Bad News Boys delivers exactly what you’d expect: more crudely rendered songs about zombies and food (or, more specifically, what happens when the latter doesn’t agree with you), doled out according to pre-established rations: There’s the paisley-pop flashbacks ("Illuminations", "Kiss My Sister’s Fist"), the church-pew R&B ("Ocean of Love"), the goofy novelty single ("Snackin’ After Midnight"), the puerile hardcore throwback ("D.F.O."—as in "diarrhea, fuck off"), and another pair of winsome belt-’em-out ballads ("Buy Bye Bhai", "Never Felt Like This") to join the likes of "Why Don’t You Lie" and "Third Ave." on your prom slow-dance card.
But the question of whether you need another record like this is ultimately answered by the fact that Khan and Sultan play like they need it, barreling through these 12 songs with audible smiles on their faces and a reinvigorated sense of camaraderie. And while the composition of Bad News Boys adheres to a tried ‘n’ true formula, the songs here consistently yield charming little details, like the bouncing baritone harmony that serves as a secondary percussion track on Khan’s "Illuminations", or the honey-sweet middle eight that emerges from the psychotic-reactive crunch of "When Will I Be Tamed?" or the quote from Hendrix’s meditative "Third Stone From the Sun" that turns up amid the cartoonish, cannibalistic anarchy of "Snackin’ After Midnight". Khan and Sultan may be devout rock'n'roll traditionalists at heart, but their deft balance of sweetness and insolence remains distinctly their own. When the heart-rending jangle-pop of "Never Felt Like This" gets rudely upended by the cantankerous closer "Zen Machines"—a sort-of juke-joint update of the Suicidal Tendencies’ "Institutionalized", with the Pepsi product placement swapped for puzzling Conan O’Brien shout-outs—it feels less like a willful act of self-destruction than a rightful restoring of order in the King Khan & BBQ universe.
