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As of early 2023, the band High Noon Kahuna is firmly in my personal list of my three best-loved, absolutely favorite local bands. I could be accused of a certain amount of bias, seeing as how I've been friends with some of the members of this band for over thirty years. But it's really about how strongly this band scratches my itch for bitchin' noise rock. And these guys dig at it like it's 1994. A full-on POWER trio, the Kahuna crew include dudes who have done time in some local institutions like seminal Maryland doom metal outfit Internal Void and mangy math-rockers Admiral Browning, as well as lesser-known but no less bangin' operations like the electronic-damaged slowcore duo Black Blizzard and the cult art-punks Vox Populi from West Virginia. So there's a lot of experience being funneled into this band.
The American post-punk vibe reverberates beneath everything these guys do, but that cymatic force arranges their pieces into new and energetic shapes. When thinking about how to describe High Noon Kahuna, the best I have been able to come up with is asking you to imagine the following brew: merge the raucous, ascerbic wit and muscular stage presence of God Bullies with a heavy smattering of early Sonic Youth, back when that latter band was still in the same zip-code as the NYC noise-skuzz crowd; add to that already-pungent mix a huge dose of bulldozing Melvins-level drone-crush that enters zones of eruptive metallic crunch just when you're not expecting it, and a chronically wicked guitar attack that is touched (in the head) by the cumulative energies of Dead Kennedys's East Bay Ray, vintage O.G. surf licks a la Dick Dale and Eddie Bertrand, and just a dank whiff of second wave black metal. All at once.
Since they've started hitting the live circuit en force, the "surfy" aspect seems to be something that some people have focused on, but that's just one strand of the DNA; High Noon Kahuna are more brooding, soulful, and battering-ram heavy than you might otherwise guess, with a rhythm section ready to drive you into the dirt like a rusted nail. Take it from me, these guys rule. If it was indeed 1994, this band would have already been added to the Amphetamine Reptile roster in a heartbeat. Bit it's not, and they aren't, so we've got the goods. Come and see. Come and hear. The band self-released their debut full-legth album Killing Spree earlier in 2022, but with some brief touring on their horizon and my ongoing lust for analog, they've partnered up with Crucial Blast to deliver this audio cassette edition of the album. Not just that, but an entire half-hour-plus mass of sound on the b-side called "Foreshadowing Vol. I", a slammin' sound-collage of songs-to-be, tape-noise antics, crushing riff-workouts, and nascent hooks that can only be heard by playing the flipside of this particular little infernal machine.
This limited-edition cassette is released in a run of one hundred copies, with full color tape art on black shells.
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