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 trash 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 favorite 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.
Kevin the Persian proofs that rock is a universal language. America has always needed outsiders to point the way, even if it is looking back to its own heritage. This album is a crash course for loud music from the early 70s to the late 90s , all the way from classic rock via metal to thrash and grunge. The album's final track Flameleaf sums it up nicely: "Why do you try to feel alive // in an alien way? // Reaching out for words that you can’t say // You thought you could // play the part of a God // Live a life in the stars // And you keep on crawling back for more".
Southern Dissonance is a self-released album (vinyl, cassette, digital) Buy it from his website. Want it on CD? Go here.
Tracks:- Coping Mechanisms
- What You Deserve
- Suicide in K Minor
- Persian Delta Blues
- Rock is Dead
- The Regulations of the Auxiliary Cloud Hall
- Southern Dissonance
- Two Minus One
- Flameleaf
