“Here Comes The Killers/Snake Oil,” the first song on Killer Kin’s Bad, Bad, Minds! starts with a grinding, strutting guitar, ominous enough already. Then the drums crash in, a distortion-drenched tremolo guitar, somewhere between punk and surf.
Even before the singer starts chanting out the first lines of the first verse — “here comes the killers / here comes the kin” — it promises danger. But it also promises something else: fun.
Chloe Rose and Matt.
Killer Kin is a five-piece that features Chloe Rose, who writes the songs, and Matt Lea, who writes the lyrics. The two assembled the band — Rose on guitar, Lea on vocals, Dan Soto on bass, Brendan Toller on lead guitar, and Jason Kyek on drums — about a year ago and if Bad, Bad, Minds! is any indication, they got to work creating one of the most searing rock bands New Haven currently has. Many of New Haven’s rock bands make smart, even refined albums. Several decades into its existence, rock music itself has moved into a phase in which many young musicians study the work of their elders and build on it, the way jazz and classical musicians do. In this landscape, Killer Kin is a delightfully proud throwback — to the garage rock of the 1960s and 1970s, for sure, but even with traces of the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, when the genre was still forming and nobody was really sure what they were doing, but they knew how to do it, with a verve and energy that could turn a room inside out.
So “Bad, Bad, Mind” starts with a snarling, curling guitar before there’s a scream from Matt, and then the band lunges forward into the kind of driving early rock ‘n’ rhythm that they would recognized at Sun Studios in the 1950s, only this is saturated and raw, and there’s a lot more screaming and swearing. “Bon Vivant” has a bluesy swagger that Matt’s lyrics turn into a sardonic take on a man with a nice car who’s maybe a little too full of himself. “Bottom Feeder Blues,” meanwhile, rides a train beat while Matt offers maybe the most deranged vocal on the album yet.
It ends, appropriately enough, with another song that — like the first one on the album — could serve as the band’s theme song. “Killer Is King” is both hilariously and self-consciously self-aggrandizing and a honest-to-God rock throwdown. It’s the kind of song that it’s easy to imagine the band destroying their instruments to, punching guitars through amps, throwing drums, and tossing basses in the air in the hopes that the necks snap off on landing. You know, the sorts of things some bands used to do.
Is Killer Kin really like that live? New Haven will have a chance to find out on Jan. 31, when the band plays at Cafe Nine opening with Alethea for The Worst. As Killer Kin has played Cafe Nine before and been invited back, it’s unlikely they wrecked the place. But the kind of music this five-piece plays on Bad, Bad, Minds! makes it easy to believe that, at least metaphorically, Killler Kin could set the place on fire.
Bad, Bad, Minds! is available on Bandcamp. Killer Kin, Alethea, and The Worst play Cafe Nine on Jan. 31, with doors at 8 p.m. and show at 9 p.m. Tickets are $5.
