KING’S X STALWARTS TY TABOR AND DUG PINNICK TAKE YOU INSIDE THREE SIDES OF ONE, THE VENERABLE PROG-ROCK TRIO’S FIRST ALBUM IN 14 LONG YEARS
By Gregory Adams
FOLLOWING A 14-YEAR drought, progressive hard rock trio King’s X have finally returned with a new album, Three Sides of One. Fittingly enough, it begins with a dramatic stormer called “Let It Rain,” which is immediately followed by a proto-djent maelstrom of open D syncopation called “Flood Pt. 1.”
Sure, King’s X have blown the gates back open, but it took some convincing for the trio to go with the flow.
“I’ve been ready to do a record since the last one; I pushed it all the time,” bassist-vocalist dUg Pinnick says of the gap, guitarist Ty Tabor adding, “It’s just been a long time since we were all hungry enough to get in and make that happen.” Drummer Jerry Gaskill admits he’d been the holdout on making new music, perhaps a reaction to having suffered a massive heart attack in 2012 that necessitated being revived, and having a second cardiac event in 2014 that led to open-heart surgery (“Dying kind of threw me for a loop — that might have been a factor in why I didn’t want to do [the album]”). Following a reassuring call with producer/engineer Michael Parnin (Mark Lanegan, Neko Case), however, Gaskill was onboard to begin recording sessions in 2019.
All of King’s X had produced solo albums between 2008’s XV and Three Sides of One. Pinnick, in particular, notes that he’d written hundreds of songs along the way, some of which appearing through his work with outside power trios KXM and Grinder Blues, as well as his most recent solo release, 2021’s Joy Bomb. But with more than 40 years of innate chemistry flowing between himself and the rest of King’s X, it only took a couple of takes at Parnin’s Blacksound Music facility in Los Angeles for the bassist to realize what he’d been missing.
“I did a lot of side projects in those 14 years, but coming out of the control room and listening to the first song back, that was the first time I ever got it: ‘This is King’s X, and this is perfect’. Not in an egotistical way, I just keep forgetting that these are the guys that I make this magic with.”
He continues: “There’s this comfort that I feel in the bubble of [King’s X] that I don’t feel when I play with other people. With others, I feel like I’m holding onto them, doing what I have to do, but with King’s X it’s like I’m riding in a Rolls Royce — [it’s] laid back.”
There are, in fact, some supremely chill moment
