Saturday, May 26, 2012

Innovative band releases album

By on March 20, 2008

Local band King of Prussia is fresh back from a trip to the Austin, Texas, South by Southwest music festival and will perform at the 40 Watt Club on Saturday.
JAKE DANIELS
Local band King of Prussia is fresh back from a trip to the Austin, Texas, South by Southwest music festival and will perform at the 40 Watt Club on Saturday.

Was the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas not in your budget this spring break? Well, you are in luck this weekend. Here is your chance to find out what you missed for free.

King of Prussia, a local Athens band signed with Kindercore Records, is fresh back from South by Southwest and is playing a free show showcasing its newest album “Save The Scene” at the 40 Watt Saturday night.

The album, although disappointingly short with only 26 minutes of music, is chock full of romantic melodies and feelings of loss and sadness, all set to upbeat and cheerful music.

“Save The Scene” also includes a special shout-out to the portable digital recording studio that was used to record the album, The BR-1180, in order to show credit to the album’s amazing instrumentalism, which is full of melody reverberation, lyrical fading and “channel-changing echo effect,” all of which add to the revolutionary musical innovations that the album showcases.

“It sounds perhaps like the way a unicorn having feelings of inadequacy would sound,” said Elizabeth Bones, one of the two newly added female members of King Of Prussia. “The feelings are dark, but he is still a freaking unicorn.”

But, King Of Prussia does not consider itself any generic unicorn. The addition of females to the band has changed the dynamic of this formally all-male ensemble somewhat. It now would consider the unicorn to be “transsexual” or “hermaphroditic.”

“King of Prussia does not buy into traditional gender roles and identities,” Bones said. “But, rather than being gender neutral, I would say King Of Prussia is more gender rich and certainly pansexual.”

Unicorns are not the only idealistic concepts that King Of Prussia uses to explain itself to listeners. What inspires the band is far more than The Shins and Athens’ own Neutral Milk Hotel, with whom King Of Prussia has been compared.

The band feels that feelings and ideals such as “the perils of time travel, the journey toward truth and goodness, the ever-evolving definition of home and impossible love” are just as important and prevalent in its music and lyrics.

Yet, these musical innovations and lyrics inspired by optimism and creativity are not what the band deems as the element of its live performances that is the most interesting and entertaining.

Brandon Hanick, the band’s front man and vocalist, attempts to show the audience that “we are all children of the earth blessed with celestial souls” through his on-stage dancing.

Bones describes Hanick’s “robotic movements, spasms and honky-tonk knee bending” as a primary reason to attend the band’s live performances.

Fellow bandmate Trey McManus describes Hanick’s arm movements as “quite spectacular” and the reason that King Of Prussia’s live performance will be the most entertaining performance in town on Saturday.

“I believe that my dancing is 15 years ahead of its time,” Hanick said. “It’s not ridiculous as much as it is incomprehensible.”