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The fact that the Krooked Kings are so passionate about making good music as a band is thanks to Bon Iver and the Guitar Hero III video game. Oli Martin has said in various interviews that his desire to understand the beauty of Bon Iver's "Holocene" led him to buy a guitar and start making music himself. Paul Colgan, who does most of the songwriting along with Oli, especially thanked the video game "Guitar Hero III".
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Krooked Kings
His mother once forced him to take piano lessons, which bored him. When the new installment of the video game series came out, he knew he wanted to play a real guitar on stage. Other influences for the band include Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes, Phoenix, STRFKR and what they call "angsty early indie rock".
All these influences merge with the Krooked Kings into a music that is both melancholic and driving and fits perfectly with an autumnal club tour. In November they play two shows in Hamburg and Berlin. If you like young "angsty early indie rock" with interesting twists and nuances, you've come to the right place with the Krooked Kings.
Salt Lake City, Utah's Krooked Kings once described their music as "the love marriage of Mac DeMarco and The Strokes' Julian Casablancas". This pretty much sums it up, although one could also include the Beach Boys as groomsmen in this equation.
This became particularly clear after the release of their second album "All Out Of Good Days", which in its strongest moments can develop similar excesses of harmony as Brian Wilson's masterpieces. This is particularly evident on the track "Sick Of Being Young," which, despite its cheeky song title, is about a band just out of college, more about the conservative folks trying to talk Oli Martin, Paul Colgan and their cronies into being more sane to give up his and her musical ambitions. In response, they come up with this easy-going and anthemic song, in which Oli Martin sings, "You said, 'I should go back to school' / 'I should act my age' / 'Stop acting a fool' / Well, I'm stuck in my ways / I'm biding my time / Is that such a crime?" Then the chorus begins, in which Oli confesses: "Oh, I'm sick of being young / Yeah, I'm sick of being young / So I'm calling your bluff."
Another highlight of the current album is "Good And Drunk". Here the Krooked Kings don't sing about the benefits of getting drunk, but deliver a catchy chorus that emphasizes the harsh reality that the worries one hopes to forget while intoxicated are still there the next day and seem worse.
