I like King Tuff.

Hey guys, why didn’t anyone tell me about King Tuff before… ?

I mean, don’t kid me, I know you’ve all been digging his stuff for years, sniggering behind my back – ‘oh, check it out, that guy’s never even HEARD of King Tuff, can ya believe it’, and so forth. Well no more.

His royal tuffness finally came to my attention a couple of months back, when a few online sinkholes I frequent posted up reports that he had a new LP on the horizon, an announcement that seemingly prompted Second Coming level excitement. Curious, I thought. From the fragmentary descriptions therein, this King Tuff fellow seemed to be right up my street, so before you know it I was clicking my way through his 2008 album ‘King Tuff Was Dead’, wondering how I could ever show my face in public again, have remained ignorant of the legitimate monarch of a certain, specific corner of electric guitar-based party music for so long.

So as to save you from a similar fate, let’s take a deep breath and reluctantly do the old ‘attempting to describe the music’ thing.

Evidently a man who has devoted a great deal of time contemplating the mysteries of T. Rex, King Tuff takes all the cool bits of that era of glam rock – the bad-ass shuffling/strutting rhythms, minimal fuss/maximum rock recording aesthetic and strange quasi-psychedelic glimmer - and weds them to a kind of endearing ‘Swell Guy’ persona, like a kind of beer-quaffing, hair-freak Buddy Holly, pulling off all the iconic rock moves you could hope for, with an earnest, slightly off-message romanticism that’s wholly individual.

The lazy will likely have deemed this ‘power-pop’, but I don’t wanna go there again, cos this has little in common with the leadfooted vacuum of 95% of those who would self-identify as ‘power-pop’. Shit this effortlessly cool just doesn’t need these tired genre tags. Awesome is its genre.

The recorded sound on ‘Was Dead’ is, appropriately, awesome – like the kind of ‘home-recording’ that transpires when you decide that the Visconti T. Rex albums are technically ‘home recordings’ and work from there. That the songs are inspired and the playing killer is also a given. This guy knows how to write a good song, how to keep it bubbling along with the kind of little nuances that reward repeat listens, and the kind of contented grooviness that stops you ever needing to check yr watch as the 3:30 mark comes and goes.

He knows how to capture the fuzzy, happy glow of infatuation and lustful anticipation really nicely, and I like the way he has of mixing up universal 'rock song' type imagery with weird, personal details that keep the whole thing specific and earth-bound (check out the bit about him driving in his Chevrolet in ‘Sun Medallion’ or “eating pizza all fucking night” in ‘Animal’).

And boy, the dude has got some LICKS too – I mean, I hate to get any more ‘Bill & Ted’ on you that I am already when writing about this sort of thing, but there is only word for the guitar-work on this record, and the word is *sweet*. Not showy or overcooked, but just *sweet*. I mean, just check out the clip below – the strumming stuff’s all fine, but just look at him go come solo time – whoop. There’s a guy whose bedroom years were not wasted.



Saying that King Tuff sounds like the natural next stage on the evolutionary ladder from party-punk greats like Mean Jeans and Personal & The Pizzas is disingenuous, because the last thing I ever want that stuff to do is EVOLVE… or at least, I didn’t think I did, until I heard King Tuff amping up the happy spirit of that aesthetic to shimmering new heights with all these real cosmic/romantic burners, singing a song called ‘Lady’ (as every great rock band should, just to prove their worth), and really makin’ it, like if some ‘70s behemoths like Dust swapped their ug for maracas and a gigantic heat-haze grin… you could almost call it ‘psychedelic’, only that would be silly. Oh wait, I already did a few paragraphs ago. Anyway, real A+ moment is after the solo when he sings “hanging out on the corner… with your girlfriends / you call my name from the window / NO NO NO!” Beautiful.



And that’s only, like, my third or fourth favourite song on the record. ‘Stone Fox’ does the same trick even better (STONE FOX! That’s the song rock bands should have to write after they’ve passed the ‘Lady’ challenge), and this one’s gotta be my #1 fave:



It’s pretty rare these days that I find a record that I find myself listening to compulsively, and that continues to make me happy across a period of several months, but ‘..Was Dead’ is it and does so.

King Tuff’s new self-titled record is out at the end of the month through the venerable auspices of Sub-Pop, so you’ll probably be seeing it here and there if you read free music papers, frequent record shops and the like.

On the basis of the two pre-release tracks they’ve put up, it’s sounding like a winner.

Five years late, but I’m glad to be here, a humble subject in King Tuff’s dominion.

Labels: I like, King Tuff