I did a double take when I read this album’s cover. From the title and band name I half expected—with a mixture of excitement and trepidation—a Jazz Age reimagining of Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go. Released in 1996, it was one of my most-revisited records between about 2005 and 2008. I loved that album, which featured decade-defining alt-rock classics “A Design for Life,” “No Surface All Feeling,” and “Australia.” This disc has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Instead, this 2020 release boasts eleven tracks of “California trad jazz and more,” with “no trumpet required”—the band’s own description, taken from their Bandcamp page. It’s a superb summary, precise in every respect: The King Street Giants do indeed hail from the Golden State, fusing New Orleans jazz with Mississippi blues, Kansas bebop, Detroit soul, Carolina funk, and perhaps a little Brazilian samba. And of their seven members, none plays a trumpet. I appreciate this no-nonsense approach very much.
Everything Must Go (which is a weirdly common album name, it turns out) is the band’s third studio effort. They wrote and produced everything on it—a far cry from the genre-crossing cover collection I was anticipating. Their sound exhibits a broad range of influences spanning the length and breadth of American popular music, extracting the essence of various styl
