One of my few brushes with greatness on Twitter was when the official King\u2019s X account liked one of my tweets. It was an old joke I made up that goes something like this:<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you hear about the new drinking game? Turn on alternative rock radio and drink every time someone rips off King\u2019s X or Faith No More.\u201d<\/p>\n
More and more, I think the same joke could apply somewhat to the Dan Reed Network. Formed in Portland, Oregon, in 1984, they had two albums (their eponymous debut and The Heat<\/i>) in 1988 and 1991 that were exhilarating mixes of funk, rock, a little white-boy soul, and a touch of metal; the first album produced one Billboard hit, \u201cRitual,\u201d as well as an incendiary video for \u201cGet To You.\u201d Never big in the states, due mostly to Mercury Records\u2019 utter inability to understand how to promote them, they are and have remained big in Europe.<\/p>\n
Reed himself has never stopped making music, living in multiple countries and making multiple solo albums. However, the Network returned to recording in 2016, and has released their latest album, Let\u2019s Hear It For The King<\/i>, on indie Drakkar Records.<\/p>\n
The Network is a veritable goulash of influences (Reed is of German, Hawaiian, and Native American ancestry, James is of Jamaican ancestry, Brannon is African-American, and Pred is Jewish) and musical connections (current keyboardist Rob Daiker has worked with Katy Perry and the Fame Riot). In general, though, the synthesis works, aided by Reed\u2019s politically, socially, and religiously incisive lyrics. They don\u2019t seem to have lost a step on King<\/i>; if anything, the sound is slightly funkier, the criticism in their music a touch more scathing. Reed walks the walk; he lives in Prague now, having left the US because of opposition to its policies.<\/p>\n
But, you ask, is this album any damned good? In a word, yes. Let\u2019s Hear It For The King<\/i> is a bitter look at fame and its price; \u201cHomegrown\u201d a paean to growing it yourself, whether it\u2019s weed or love; and \u201cI See Angels\u201d is a surprisingly gentle song about how we are often angels to each other. (\u201cWe are unsure angels exist, so we must be angels to each other\u201d\u2014I forget who said it). And then\u2014\u201cStumble.\u201d Acid, funny, funky as hell, \u201cStumble\u201d is about religion and how foolish we all can be about it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not overly fond of \u201cStarlight\u201d; the lyrics seem trite and the production lags behind the rest of the CD. But on the whole, Let\u2019s Hear It For The King<\/i> is tight, funky, thought-provoking, and rocks relatively hard. Sounds like a recipe for success to me.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":34610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6108],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-46460","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-dan-reed-network","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46460"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}