Here comes some old idiot grandpa talk, so gather round my 7″ collection and I’ll tell you a tale about an era long gone; the screamo, artsy, batshit-crazy grindy bands from the 90’s (I refuse to say skramz; that’s for gangly fruitcakes in denim yoga pants that do Jazz Hands in the mosh pit). Bands that leveled venues in a single performance, barfed while playing hot summer basement shows from rocking to hard and loved the artwork of Steak Mountain…Combatwoundedveteran, The Locust, Reversal of Man, Jerome’s Dream, In/humanity, Orchid, Antioch Arrow, Jenny Piccolo, Gasp, Usurp Synapse, Guyver One, Antioch Arrow, Palatka, Neil Perry, Toshiro Mifune, Discordance Axis, The Swing Kids, Majority Rule, etc.
Post 90’s bands like Ruhaeda, Daughters, An Albatross, Ampere, Das Oath, Welcome the Plague Year, White Suns, Warsawwasraw, Tiny Hawks, and others have been keeping these traditions alive but this style of “metal” has become sparse.
This brings me to the mysterious KLS from Spain (not to be confused with the Finnish Christian rock band with the same name). Though it is only six songs long and coming in at a little over five minutes, Superpop is the audio equivalent of smoking bath salts at a Chuck E. Cheese; it combines just the right amount of disjointed guitar wreckage, unstable breakdowns, and spastic blast beats without sounding too much like slop; it’s like Harry Pussy, early Daughters, and Combatwoundedveteran snuck into that teleportation device in The Fly while Jeff Goldblum wasn’t looking and created some slime-dripping mutated freak.
If KLS live is anything like the high-energy paroxysm captured on Superpop, they must be on the shit list of every venue in Spain. I recommend every release from KLS, and if you listen to them all at once it is almost a full length album!
Rating: 5.5 out of 6 Doves Prince’s Minnetonka Tea Time was interrupted when he overheard KLS’s Superpop and thought for a split second that it may almost be as good as one of his own. After splashing his cup of tea into his ankle masseuse’s face, he went downstairs into his studio and wrote the best mind-melting neo-funk-jazz-fusion box set known to man.