Kal Marks: Wasteland Baby

Speaking to Kal Marks’ Carl Shane back in 2022 before the release of My Name Is Hell, the subjects that tie together their equally excellent follow-up, Wasteland Baby, were prevalent during our conversation.

With a song like Whatever the News, the four-piece, led by Shane alongside Christina Puerto (guitar/ vocals), John Russell (bass) and Adam Berkowitz (drums), underline a part of most people’s day whereby there’s just too much exhaustion to fight against the status quo. An acceptance that, quite simply, it is what it is.

Not Kal Marks, though. They are rightly pissed off, and while you’d expect the themes that underpin Wasteland Baby to contain a backdrop of the staple Kal Marks wall-to-wall noise, this is where the biggest surprise comes. They’ve slowed it down, and in doing so it’s made these songs better.

The Jesus Lizard: Rack

At first, it felt like these songs lacked the required punch, and it wasn’t until it became time to put pen to paper about them when it dawned on me how much of a boon Wasteland Baby is. More and more, it feels like the band’s watershed moment, littered with tight grooves and a volley of statements tailor-made for these times.

And while the eponymous ‘intro’ is a warped ballad that conveys the first of many shifts in Kal Marks’ approach, while some may mistake this for a fever dream, fear not. This is reality and Kal Marks serve it up like revenge: cold.

“I’ve got a lot of contempt for this world,” spits Shane on the blues-rock rumble of Insects. His vitriol firmly in the ire of this cost-of-living crisis that feels like it’s set to plunge the world into oblivion (“You won’t make it out alive / It’s a trial all the time”).

Hard Work Got You Nowhere and You Are Found follow a similar path, as Shane exposes the truths of a system that is beyond repair. Through a string of strangled howls and bone-raw melodies, these are songs that illuminate society’s sleepwalking nature. Where busting your arse every day in hope that something will actually pay off is actually easier than questioning the system itself.

Meanwhile, Any Way It Goes feels as though it was conceived from the underbelly of said wasteland. Puerto’s guitars, slow, lurching noise-rock at quarter-speed, and here’s where Kal Marks find new ground. Shane’s melodies haven’t sounded stronger, creating new space for his band mates to move through. And it’s here where Wasteland Baby goes from strength-to-strength.

Firstly, with the newfound majesty of album highlight, the aptly titled Motherfuckers. Sludge rock that sinks deep into the grooves, and while the echoes of being strangled into submission by the daily grind are heard, it’s Shane’s rancour towards the rich that hits the hardest; an emphatic “fuck you” to those with money who think their problems should be shouldered by the working class.

SUUNS: The Breaks

Then there’s penultimate track, the dirge-y downtrodden blues of Midnight, which hits like whiplash. “I wish I’d never been born” claims Shane in one of his most dejected moments caught on tape. It’s yet another poignant statement from an album that has many.

There’ room for a few more on the eponymous closing track, too, as Shane defiantly states that “We’ll keep the hellscape at bay”. As the song moves through the fault-lines, the first flicker of hope emerges (“Every day is a good day to be by your side”). It’s Kal Marks’ All You Need is Love moment, and through the vestiges of a world that continues to unravel in calamitous ways, perhaps the immediate cause for change starts by how you interact with those closest to you. Your loved ones. Your community. Shane and Kal Marks are most certainly aware of this, but it doesn’t hurt to reach big. Because when you do, albums like Wasteland Baby can happen.

Wasteland Baby is out now via Exploding In Sound Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.