Fuck this shit, I ain't going to Rik Mayall

It was the seminal Yorkshire rock band Smokie that put it best when they asked the interminably important question, “who the fuck is Alice?” Conflicting speculation has conjured ethereal images of a backing band retaining the name of their departed lead singer, a spurned artist’s homage to an inimitable former lover, and crazed, manic muses. Yet it’s unlikely that anybody really gives a fuck about Alice, for beneath a veil of oblique and mystique lie a band that blends canonical literary allusions and mythology with insolence, incensed guts and a vigour more exciting than any intangible namesake.

The nature versus nurture debate is easily applicable to a counterculture that has been steadily and progressively bastardised since the ‘70s to such an extent that the likes of Sum 41 with Deryck “the human blister” Whibley and Bowling for Soup could ostensibly be classified using the now cavernous umbrella term ‘punk’. Issues of authenticity and the predicament of the “poseur” have long been in the foreground, but is it just to accuse a band of shitting on the legacy of such luminaries as the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash (the holy trinity of protopunk?) just because your music isn’t politically or socially motivated and you aren’t an advocate of nihilism, anarchism, or any other radical, liberal precepts that end with the suffix ‘ism’.

The Alice Kona Band aren’t drug addled, disaffected gutter punks concerned with anti-consumerism, social liberalism, and three guitar chords. In fact, they’re really quite nice, well brought up young men, who just so happen to subscribe to the sonic ideology of Kurt Cobain, who claimed that “punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want”. This refusal to yield to anyone’s standards except their own has generated an assortment of feverish, unrefined songs whose elements summon recollections of the D.C. hardcore scene- the vitality, aggression and inherent melodic hooks of bands such as Bad Brains and Minutemen, and the ramshackle, crude progeny of glam rock; ‘70s L.A punk bands such as the Germs. Ryan Wiles, singer and guitarist in the thrice figureheaded outfit claims; “we don’t lie to anyone, we don’t make out we’re something we’re not. We haven’t budged or taken on board any criticism, constructive or not.” These traces of the punk aesthetic and ethos, combined with other musical influences such as ‘50s surf music and ‘60s girl groups in the vein of the Crystals and the Shangri-Las, they produce a subversive wall of sound that would make Phil Spector roll in his prison cell. Yet just because the band borrow from various influential genres and eras of music, they’re not simply unstimulated, unstimulating parody; Wiles claims, “if I did sing about diners and my best girl, we'd be fucking irrelevant”. The band harnesses its musical freedom with frank lyrics which read like the inner monologue of the protagonist in a Salinger novel set to music; personal, pathetic, impassioned and possibly in need of psychoanalysis.

Just as Pat Smear was the only member of the Germs who had any prior musical experience whatsoever, so too do the Alice Kona Band have a propensity to pass over tight technical ability in favour of all that is ad hoc and impulsive, qualities that make them insistently exciting. The band’s recordings thus far aren’t anywhere as gripping as seeing them live; whilst they capture a marriage of melody and discord, there has been a slight dilution of Alice Kona’s special brand of doo-wop-desecrated-by-hacksaw-guitars. Perhaps it’s just too difficult to cut a record that can embody band members bleeding over a stage, instruments being smashed to pieces, frontmen screaming with such putrescence they’re on the verge of passing out. The vocals are nasal and snarling and evocative and not entirely dissimilar to Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus, or at times, TSOL’s Jack Grisham. The guitars have been raped by feedback to within an inch of their lives, and battle with one another for supremacy. Erratic solos screech over thrusting bass, and it’s all a glorious mess that ultimately delivers that trademark Nirvana mangled union of inherent rage and accessible pop.

The Alice Kona Band- Scavengers by peesmith

The Alice Kona Band- Go Ask Alice by peesmith

The Alice Kona Band- Death Record by peesmith

More acerbic than curdled milk and most misanthropic, the Alice Kona Band may not give a shit but they deserve your attention. They play Lavery’s Bunker on 29th May with the Cast of Cheers. It is but a mere five of the queen’s pounds in, and your attendance is essential.





* Their drummer didn't know how to play his instrument upon joining the band. Inneresting