The first two instrumental minutes of Mark Sultan’s gritty four-minute opener “Icicles” release like a noisy prelude to a loud, ballsy off-off-Broadway musical. Garage rock royalty and the BBQ half of King Khan and BBQ Show, this one-man band can swing from coarse tincan guitar to crooning like a lovelorn, long-lost Animals member, as in “I Get Nothin’ from My Girl,” but always through a permeable wall of fuzz. Cheeky in the lyrics, Sultan still bridges the musical gap between the malt shop and the drag race: dirty rockabilly and garage rock, dipped in cherry cola sentiment.
This article appears in Apr 15-21, 2010.
