CKY – Carver City

CKY’s Carver City is a sonic assault on the eardrums that will have you headbanging, playing air guitar, and dancing simultaneously. Written off as talentless buffoons by Rolling Stone on their previous release, 2005’s An Answer Can Be Found, CKY proves with Carver City that they are well beyond the “stoner metal” genre invented by mainstream magazines with 60-year-old music reviewers, who long for the days of Led Zeppelin, and cannot accept the fact that kids with skateboards might just have a good ear for music (sometimes).

Carver City is a concept album centering around a seaside town that is all glitter and glitz on the surface but beneath has something more sinister in store for its visitors. But the most mind blowing concept here is simply good music. From the get-go the opening track hooks the listener with the stomp-stomp-stomp pounding of “Hellions On Parade” followed by the equally catchy “…And She Never Returned.” The disc continues to shred through the barriers of punk and progressive with “Rats In The Infirmary” and “Karmaworks.”

The only beef here is that the album limps off with “The Era Of An End” and the first single chosen was “A#1 Roller Rager,” which is a song about is good as its title – it blows. Having heard every CKY album I can say with confidence that “A#1 Roller Rager” is the worst song they have done. But every band has crappy songs and the rest of the album carries this release to the forefront of rock albums released in 2009 so far.

Oh, and Rolling Stone didn’t even touch this one.