Danny’s Been a Busy Boy: Kvalla + New Jonxage

Seemingly in an effort to prove once more that Houston drummers just don’t freakin’ sleep, local drum god, Houston Press writer, and SCR contributor guy Danny Mee deserves a mention today both for his brand-new band Kvalla and for a brand new track, “Highway At Night”, up on the Myspace page of his “real” band, the always mindblowing Jonx. (Oh, and he also drums from time to time for Inoculist & something called Inscrutable Vocabulary. Again: no sleep, which leaves more time for productive things like bands.)

The latter of the two shows off just why those Jonx fellas rule the freakin’ stage — surging, simmering, NoMeansNo-sounding bass, sharp-edged guitars that meander tensely about like a crazy person muttering to themselves on the street but about to snap and punch some random passer-by, and thundering, complex drums that make me think of Fugazi. If this is a hint of what’s to come for the next album, y’all, I need to know about it when it’s out, immediately if not sooner.

Kvalla, on the other hand, is, as its Scandinavian-sounding(?) name (which I’ve Googled to no avail, unfortunately) suggests, is full-on, growling-and-roaring, invoking-the-god-of-thunder-above mëtäl. Grawr. The band’s new-new-new — their first show will be on December 21st up at Rudyard’s with the aforementioned Jonx and The Squishees — but the music they’ve already got hammered out sounds pretty damn good. Epic, bass-heavy, overfuzzed, crushing metal that brings to mind (favorably) Mastodon, Pelican, High on Fire, and Early Man, all of which is extremely cool by me. Can’t wait to see what these guys do.

(And yes, if you’d asked me a few years ago if I ever thought I’d be saying that about a Houston metal band, I would’ve laughed in your face; my, how things change…)