Album Review | 'Endless Pleasure'

With tightness and agility rivaling our hero’s teal spandex attire on the cover, Aweful Kanawful’s Endless Pleasure (released Feb. 14) excites as it offers track after track of through-composed, golden-brown, theatrically hardened specialties. The ensemble prances upon rock and roll forms, with Danny Cocuzza and Bob Marshall on guitars, Brendan Lake drumming and Graham Balcomb playing bass — led by Austin Lake, who composed and sings the music and lyrics.

“Halitosis” punctuates down a thematic slide into a wild dissonant punch with endless life and pleasure in question, before badly breathing into bad blood, as “Horse With No Name” proclaims: That’s not blood, it’s just dirty water, running through my veins, but they say it’s too late to operate.

Key changes, modulations, tempo shifts and perfectly unhinged guitar work are building blocks of Endless Pleasure and lay perfectly amidst Lake’s wry observational lyrical narrative. Rapid power punk landscapes youth, from passing out and skipping the SATs to being discovered naked on your parents kitchen floor (told on “Pretend You’re Sleeping”), giving way to a promise on “Seventeen”: There’s a whole lotta fish in the ocean and I’m jumping in.

On tip toes, “Hello It’s Me” cutely doo-wops for a take-me-back, continuing into “Bomb’s Away,” a creamy, soul-rock explosion with Blues Brothers swagger. Intense and sinister instrumentation warps “Some Girls” around alternative universes of hard rock, flipping the channel to journeys with “Jimmy the Jetpack,” a riffy guitar-fueled soundtrack for the space cowboy.

Articulate, beefy abandonment lets “Highnoon” tick at an extreme rate of speed, with Lake’s perfectly crispy vocal delivery soaring above this Jam-like run around the “rhythm of my heart.” “Hopeless Romantic” displays immense hard-rock prowess, as the unsettled lead does its best to fit in where he doesn’t belong, before admitting his yearning heart’s fate as the band fakes a “ta-da” ending.