That Delicious Vice

Album review

There's often a fine line between danger and fun, and as a lifelong advocate of edgy music, Kid Congo Powers knows it well. As a member of the Gun Club, the Cramps, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Powers knows how to make music that's spooky, swampy, and dark while still sounding exciting and engaging, and he's put those skills to work in his solo project, Kid Congo & the Pink Monkey Birds. 2024's That Delicious Vice is his fifth LP with the Pink Monkey Birds, and if the group's early albums seemed a bit tentative, as if he was still finding his way as a bandleader after decades as a sideman, this music speaks of strength and confidence, with Powers' raw, slashing slide guitar and deep, theatrical vocals dominating these songs. Tracks like "A Beast, A Priest," "Silver for My Sister," and "East of East" capture the sublimely creepy feel of watching an especially strange Mexican horror movie at 4 a.m., with their minimal melodies, deliberate tempos, and forbidding narratives. Not everything here is gloomy, and "Ese Vicio Delicioso" is a potent Latin dance number about Powers' lifelong obsession with music; "The Smoke Is the Ghost" and "Never Said" are slow but arresting exercises in film noir atmospherics; and "The Boy Had It All" is a lean, insistent bit of punky energy. As good as he is, Powers always works best with collaborators on his own level, and his fellow Monkey Birds Mark Cisneros on guitar and bass and Ron Miller on drums give him the muscular, nuanced support these songs deserve. Alice Bag, one of Powers' contemporaries on the early L.A. punk scene (and someone who has also lived at the nexus of punk and Latino cultures), also lends her talents to the project, writing two songs ("A Beast, A Priest" and "Wicked World") and performing backing vocals on five, and her ability to sound both sensuous and incisive is just what this music needs. The slow crawl through the nightmarish "Murder of Sunrise" doesn't need to be 17 minutes long, but otherwise, That Delicious Vice finds Kid Congo Powers going from strength to strength as a frontman, and holds a special place in his stellar resumé.

© Mark Deming /TiVo