Kings Go Forth w/ JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound

Tonight @ Turner Hall Ballroom, 8 p.m.

Between cleaning house at this year’s 88Nine Milwaukee Music Awards—where they took home honors for Artist of the Year, Song of the Year (“One Day”), Best New Artist and Most Likely to Blow Up—and signing to David Byrne’s Luaka Bop Records, 2009 has been kind to Kings Go Forth. Tonight the local 10-piece retro funk/soul group, which uses three singers to recreate the sound of early-’60s vocal ensembles like The Esquires and The Seven Sounds, celebrates the upcoming release of its debut LP. Given the quick success the group found after recording just a handful of songs, it should be interesting to see what they accomplish now that they have a full length under their belts. Openers JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, from Chicago, draw from a different branch of soul music, the Memphis R&B popularized by Stax Records.

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anonymous

I just cannot understand the popularity of this band. I have seen them multiple times, each time hoping they would change my opinion of them, but continue to fall short. My biggest problem with this band... big a genre and stick to it. If you're going for funk... then be funk... if you are going to do Ska... do ska... and so on. With the popularity of "One Day" the choice should be clear, but unfortunately funk/ska/regge is just a dying genre.

anonymous

Not that KGF are quite o THIS level, but would have bitched that, say, The Beatles (or The Kinks, or ...) didn't stick to the beat, or the psychedelia, or the ballad, or the pop, or the, well, whatever thing as well? From track-to-track on most any given album from Rubber Soul onward? Or, more recently, that The Clash really should've chosen, punk OR reggae? Or ... or look at it this way: KGF is a collective affort, but it's masterminded by a musician who's put in at least as much time as a DJ as he has as an instrumentalist, working with a band with interests/influences/previous-to-ongoing projects raging from ska to Latin soul and jazz to funk to ... and who has a particularly good working knowledge of muiscal scenes (mod, Northern soul, hip hop, rare groove, et al.) noted/notorious for their syncretic passion when it comes to American/Jamaican black music, from blues to mento to R&B to soul to ska to funk to rocksteady to boogie to dub to disco to hip hop to ... well, free your mind, and your brain will follow, is all I can say. Meanwhile, ska et al. isn only dying in the hands of American subfratboy hacks whio think all they need is an ex-punk rock guitarist who's reversed his pummeling into a sturdy upstroke, some hats and suspenders, and a few of the band geeks they used to beat up on horns ...

anonymous

I'm Dave Monroe again, by the way, and I approve this response ...

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anonymous

And y'all didn't even bother to mention 'em when they played their first public gig opening for a sold out Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings show @ the same venue. I'm not one to shout "bandwagon jumper" in a crowded ballroom, but I AM one say, "I told you so." And I did. So there ...