Opus Kink aren’t like your average band, and that’s a good thing. Emerging from Nice Swan’s stable of new talent, they don’t fit neatly into the safe little boxes of uniform compliance. With a wild, evolving range of influences and an almost enigmatic energy, they smashed our Dork’s Night Out Great Escape preview at London’s 100 Club last month. Now, they’ve dropped their debut EP ‘Til The Stream Runs Dry’, which we’ve tasked them to run through for our latest Artist’s Guide. Embrace the chaos.
Good day and commiserations to you, hapless reader (excuse us?! – Ed). ”Til The Stream Runs Dry’ is out now, which means that we have no agency over the songs anymore, and it would be futile trying to nail any concrete meaning or character to them, especially seeing as there is none, and such things don’t exist anyway. So project as you like; call it cowboy mariachi jazz or whatever dross is circulating at the moment. There are eight billion possible viewpoints, not including divine essence, so fill these boots how you would like to. Now that I have made myself clear, here is a song-by-song divulgence of the exact meaning and character of this cowboy mariachi jazz record.
Into The Stream
The intro track is actually the most densely lyrical. It’s our Satanic subliminal messaging unit. The words, however, are buried so deep in the mix that you will just have to let the hidden occult manipulation do its work by osmosis as you let the overindulgent B-movie title-sequence barrage wash over and through you.
I Love You, Baby
Due to a clerical error, we released this single the day after Valentine’s Day, which was violently frustrating, yet still the nation’s hearts beat for it with sickly vigour, probably. It’s just a love song, as neutered and confused as they come. Just a joke at the expense of my internal affairs. My favourite bit is when they shout ‘Stephen’ halfway through.
Dog Stay Down
This is the oldest track on the EP, from over a year ago. It features the band clearing their throats over a four-four beat. Jazz wrote a large part of the music, and I stole some sentiments and hooks from a record I won’t name and shouted them over the top of it. We have to do an arbitrary freeform swing bit every now and then to lay claim to ‘jazz-punk’, so that’s what we’ve bolted on the end here.
St Paul of the Tarantulas
This song was inspired by an episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and by The Pogues’ ‘Turkish Song of The Damned’, which also utilises the technique of adding a classic folk melody on the end to flesh it out without putting effort in. We used the Tarantella Napoletana. It has lots of little bits to it and is very, very fun to play live, especially the tuneless bastardisation of Gregorian choir music.
(I’m Going Down To That) Hole In The Ground
We wrote this one in the studio, so it’s the youngest on the record. It’s vaguely about being tortured and dying for the motherland and being sexually aroused by the whole thing. Erotic masochistic patriotism. This is how we all feel about England and the royal family. The refrain ‘this one’s for the motherland’ came about when we grimly admitted to ourselves that we could no longer sing the hook from Justin Timberlake’s ‘SexyBack’ over it.
The Unrepentant Soldier
Continuing in the vein of cheap thinly-veiled not-very-shocking shock tactics, this song is an ode to the enduring quality of evil, with a committed villain of a soldier bleeding out and masturbating under a tree that smells like semen, a stray child collecting the various fluids in a bucket and the torch being passed, new faces in hell, etc, etc. The trumpet solo by the eminent Jack Banjo Courtney is a highlight of the record and the live set.
‘Til The Stream Runs Dry
The title-track is a kind of cesspool of the record’s general themes. It’s probably about being morally weak and inclined to degradation. It’s the first time an acoustic guitar has been used on an Opus Kink track, which we hope is not as horrifying as that sounds. As is, unfortunately, becoming the norm, I have buried the base mundanity of the themes in grandiose Catholic imagery, which is not yet widely accepted as cultural appropriation but soon may be. It’s the longest one on the EP, and the thought of making a radio edit of it was too daunting, but I hope it gets its due flogging because it’s my personal favourite. The end section is also a pigheaded enticement to singalong during shows so, please do so in future or face the brunt of our puny anger.
There you have our two sad little cents. Next time you ask, the answers will be different, but why not take us at our word now? Life is short. Be sure to buy this record and come to our next shows so you may better defame this article in the flesh. Salud!
Opus Kink’s debut EP ‘Till The Stream Runs Dry’ is out now.
