Music Review // The Gulps "The Kings House" (Youth Sounds)

Single Premiere ::: http://www.punktastic.com/radar/the-gulps-premiere-new-track-the-kings-house/
Video Premiere ::: https://www.xsnoize.com/video-premiere-the-gulps-the-kings-house-watch-now/

The Gulps is such a great name for a band because everyone kind of gulps at times when they swallow air or saliva, but yet, you tend to do that gulp when you are nervous or guilty or lying and so it has a great understated double meaning in a sense.   Plus it's like The Slits or The Clash where it would just look great on a sticker or a t-shirt.     "The Kings House" is the first single off the upcoming EP of the same name due out in April 2019.

While there are certainly elements of punk in this song, it also has these guitar riffs and just technical skills where you could even put it into a category of something like garage or rock n roll.   There aren't a lot of bands which sound like The Gulps, as they have that raw energy of Sex Pistols with that modern vibe of someone like Subsonics.   In some sense, if the Sex Pistols were classically trained in their instruments and played them as such this could have been similar to the resulting sound.

The video seems to further the message of the song.   At its heart, "The Kings House" is about class warfare.   You think about the king living in this house with his family and everything is fun and brightly colored for them, but then everyone outside of that might not be as well off.   I recently watched "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" for the first time in years and this song has a lot of that mentality to it- where the poor and less rich are out there killing each other while the richest live so protected and so sheltered and it's just sad that some people in this world have more money than they'll ever be able to spend while others go without basic needs.

One of the biggest differences with this song and my being in the United States is that we don't have a king here and even though it feels like the POTUS should be our "king", I think we exist more in the United States as a monarchy where business owners are allowed certain advantages over everyone else.   I would look more towards someone like Jeff Bezos as being the king that someone like Robin Hood would need to come in and take down than the POTUS or anyone in government really.    But I think that class structure, unfortunately, exists just about everywhere and the more we talk about it, the more we sing about it, hopefully the more it changes.