A brew of rock, country, soul, blues and dark words that is never dull.
“Kill The Architect” is Gasoline Lollipops’ seventh studio album and follows 2022’s “Nightmares”. The band, from Boulder, Colorado, have produced an impressive brew of country, country-rock, soul, blues, and metal allied to dark but engaging words.
Lead singer Clay Rose, who wrote all the songs, is a key figure. Brought up by an “outlaw, truck-driving father in the mountains of Colorado” and a country-songwriting mother, the ideas for the album came to him while writing “Sam & Delilah”, “a psychedelic country ballet based upon the Biblical tale of Samson and Delilah”. The rest of the band brought his songs to life with live takes in the studio, giving them vigour and energy. Production is by Steve Berlin from Los Lobos.
The strong opener, ‘Tennessee Nights’, is a story of drug-fueled bootlegging across the state line, in the same ballpark as some of the Drive-By Truckers’ tales. With bluesy piano at the start, horns are added later to give a soulful feel. There is then a change of style with the menacing, looping riff of ‘Holy Rebel’, with its echoes of the Truckers’ ‘The Driver’. This is followed by the gentler soft-rock of ‘Mercy’, with electric piano, and these quite drastic changes continue through the album.
The words on ‘Mercy’ suggest someone struggling with demons, and this is a theme throughout the album: “Why am I still waiting for some mercy to rain down on me/And free these roses/ From their dirty seeds”. On the next two tracks, both quite traditional country music, you sense some pain from Rose’s upbringing. On ‘Honeysuckle and Poison Oak’, there are the words “Silhouettes of the folks’ regrets/ cast shadows on our wall” and on ‘Horse Or The Cart’, he writes “I took apart my inner child’s little heart/ And saw it never had nothing from the start”.
Next up is the heavy metal of title track ‘Kill The Architect’ with its growled vocals – it sounds like Motorhead, albeit with a good chorus. This and the thrash metal of ‘Elvis’ are a bit jarring and don’t really fit with the rest of the album, whereas you don’t get this feeling about any of the other songs here, which combine more coherently as americana. Elsewhere, there is ‘Humanity’, with jazzy electric piano, and the Townes Van Zandt-like ‘Black Hole’ with its simple acoustic guitar. The nihilistic ‘Come Here To Die’, “I hate my job, I hate my wife/I hate my children, and I hate my life” is country-rock with a real groove, and ‘Waiting For The Devil’ has a nice swing and twanging country guitar.
‘The River’ closes the album as it started, with the blues and some soul, particularly in the female harmonies. Rose appears to have had a wife, but here and in ‘Black Hole’ he writes of this finishing “Before I knew you/ I never knew love/ Now once again/ Everything has gone to hell”. However, the mention of love, even if now ended, seems to lighten and lift the whole album, and so finishes it well.
The range of styles on show here and the compelling words, which have a “living-on-the-edge” feel, mean that over the course of 42 minutes there is never a dull moment.
