King Black Acid – Queen City Sounds and Art

Birdie Swann Sisters & King Black Acid, photo courtesy the artists

“Hurricane” by Birdie Swann Sisters & King Black Acid in its Birdie Swann Mix iteration lends the song a softer quality. The animated video with collaged images of imperiled and infamous women in a band playing the song (Squeaky Fromme, Shelley Duvall, Judy Garland, Jayne Mansfield and Sharon Tate) and a figure with a large, papier mache head frolicking in he forest in a kind of manic delirium playing guitar and dancing while a psychedelic world and all its contents continue to swirl. In the end we see the papier mache head in flames. The psychedelic pop song is an embrace of having a tumultuous heart and a passionate and highly emotional nature, being a little volatile, even unhinged, at times and in generally not being able to give less than everything, which is more than you get from a lot of people. Despite the lyrics depicting chaos the song is catchy and itself sounds more celebratory than menacing perhaps proving that sometimes what you see isn’t fully the essence of what you get with someone. Watch the video for “Hurricane” on YouTube and follow King Black Acid on Bandcamp.

King Black Acid on Bandcamp

King Black Acid, photo courtesy the artist

The stop motion/claymation music video for King Black Acid’s “Kissed at the Cemetery” with the images a cemetery, the vampire guitarist/singer, aliens coming down to harass and then put into coffins is the perfect storybook presentation for the song’s lyrics. Musically it’s a gentle, psychedelic pop number with a luminous guitar melody and paired vocals that are both elevated and whimsical that fans of Broncho and The Flaming Lips will appreciate though it has a more lighthearted pop touch. The surreal lyrics are about true love and the perils of the forces of evil coming to threaten it. In this case the character of The Devil so maybe the story is set in a universe where our protagonist is in uneasy cahoots with the Horned One. But whatever the case, as if a song has to make strict narrative sense anyway, apparently the titular cemetery is a party on the weekend and marijuana gives our narrator special powers and an unlikely true love wins out in the end. Watch the highly creative video for “Kissed at the Cemetery” on YouTube and connect with the long-running space rock/psychedelic band King Black Acid at the links below. The project’s latest album The Rainbow Lodge released on April 7, 2023.