As a whole, the music industry is going through rough times right now, but things are starting to look a lot brighter towards the end of 2021 than they did at the halfway point in 2020. Rock is slowly but surely getting back on its feet with and without the presence of live music, and interestingly enough, the surge in respect for the genre’s most classical of sounds is being driven by an incendiary campaign from the American underground. Acts like Seattle’s own Vicious Kitty are on the come-up, and doing it with retro rhythm ala “Mr. Darkness” this October.
URL: https://www.viciouskitty.band/
“Mr. Darkness” has a lot of intensity on the guitar front, but I don’t know that the cornerstone of its charm can be traced to the string play alone. Instead, what the percussion is hammering out beneath the guitar parts almost from the start of the track forward is too important to the structure of the verses to go without receiving a lot of credit for the chills factor in this song, not to mention the fluidity of the lyrics as they’re presented from behind the mic. One hand washes the other in this mix, and it creates quite the refreshing and tight sound indeed.
The bass is offering up a pretty guttural punch that the drums do virtually nothing to buffer, leaving our singer rather vulnerable to the rough edges of the mix more than he would be in a more streamlined recording, but his is a style that doesn’t assume any damage from the discord – it radiates in it. He’s getting more out of the bedlam in the beats than he would be something more predictable, and I don’t know that you have to hear this song more than once to come to the same conclusion I did.
This mix is a lot more physical than it has to be, but to this end, there isn’t anything in “Mr. Darkness” that one couldn’t deem muscular. To me as both a critic and a lifelong rocker myself, it works well because of how brawny everything else in this track is – the guitar, the vocal, even the harmonies at the fever pitch of the chorus. This is a meaty (but not quite metallic show of strength if I’ve ever heard one before, and it’s hard to say differently if you’re listening to it at the proper volume this fall.
I can’t wait to hear what Vicious Kitty is going to produce in the studio next, and if there’s something I take away from this particular release about their brand and the aesthetics they care about the most, it’s that they aren’t about to be indebted to their forerunners just because they love making big noise as much as they did. For all of its retro qualities, “Mr. Darkness” has a modern undertow that makes us believe it has a sprinkling of the future in its construction, and I’m eager to find out where Vicious Kitty goes with its formula in the future. Finally I must say that this review is the perfect fit for The Spotted Cat Magazine.
Rachel Townsend