Kevin the Persian will perform a solo acoustic show @Old Arabi Lighthouse Records and Books in Arabi, Louisiana on January 12 18:00, playing a bunch of his recent singles and tracks from his debut album Southern Dissonance: "Rock is a universal language. America has always needed outsiders to point the way, even if it is looking back to its own heritage."
HCTF review of Southern Dissonance.
HCTF's annual list of the 20 albums that will be in regular rotation for many years to come. As per usual many genres are represented. Here Comes The Flood covers a lot of ground and it shows in this eclectic, final tally.
Today: countdown from number 15 to 11.
Please shop at your local record store. The folks who work there know their stuff. And most of the stores have a pretty good website where you can order your stuff. It might even be cheaper than the big ones on the 'net.
Buy directly from the artist, attend live shows and stop by the merch table. And be sure to tell your friends about that great new act you discovered. Word-of-mouth can't be beat as the prime source to discover new music.
Sometimes loud rock music can offer solace. Musician Kevin the Persian got it all out of his system holed up in old industrial building in New Orleans, recording the songs for what would become his debut album, Southern Dissonance, a collection of no holds barred guitar driven music. He describes his art as "music for masochists..." and sure enough, the lyrics are rather bleak, right from the off, with the album's opener Coping Mechanisms: "2022 // Eight billion years to go // Until the sun decides to swallow the earth".
Cooking up a hybrid of classic rock and thrash metal, he lashes out at people who blame the world for their troubles (What You Deserve), dreams about getting away from it all (Suicide in K Minor), and contemplates the end of the road for his favourite kind of music (Rock is Dead). The latter sentiment is not exactly new - Pete Townshend wrote Long Live Rock for the shelved Rock Is Dead—Long Live Rock! album by The Who in 1972. With the current prominence of the use of electronics in modern popular music, guitar players are no longer the epitome of cool. Maybe it is time for him to seek sanctity and enjoy The Regulations of the Auxiliary Cloud Hall, like the monks in Japan do. He is an outsider in his own immediate surroundings in the Deep South, despite being born as a citizen of the "Confederate States of America". That is Southern Dissonance in a nutshell, a rocker whose appearance makes narrow-minded and conservative white people twitch.
