Dragons of Zynth
Coronation of Thieves
Gigantic Music
By Jose Fritz
Their name sounds like some kind of lost jazz argot or something Lenny Bruce would have mumbled about between sets. There the record sits one part throwback, three parts art rock and one part unjustly persecuted inebriate. They find themselves compared to Bad Brains and Living Color, Apollo Heights and TV on the Radio for two reasons: because they toured with them or because they are brown. If you asked a dozen hipsters to name five black rock bands, most would stop after naming Bad Brains and Living Color, forgetting the entire funk and northern soul movements. It’s not fair and it does a disservice to them, their tourmates and the history of rock n’ roll.
They hail from Cleveland, the city that bore us rock n’ roll. March of ‘51 was the first time that the black man blessed the honkys with the gift of rock n’ roll. It came in the form of the song Rocket 88. The white man (Bill Haley) immediately hustled out a cover version to keep the blandness rolling. Despite all that cognitive dissonance, the TV on the Radio comparison manages to land in the right ballpark.
Return to Cookie Mountain, the free-jazz inflected indie-rock opus possibly did more for Dragons of Zynth than TV on the Radio. Sure, the album was an art-rock epic, but “Let the Devil” in stood out like the disco ball above the floor glittering in the darkness. And while we’re meditating on that image, I’d like to point out that the twins in Dragon, Aku and Akwetey are direct descendants of the black rock n’ roll tradition. They tap into that not because they are black, but because of their dub-tinged, Hendrix-fueled psychedelia influences.
If you look back at the era, this makes sense. Jimi Hendrix joined Curtis Knight and the Squires in 1965. At the same time the Flamingos were putting out their first singles northern soul was on the rise, although it would eventually degenerate into disco while Hendrix degenerated into a heroin overdose. Somewhere while crossing between the two, Coronation of Thieves becomes a jumbled mess of competing ideas. Every part that is briefly smooth or soulful must immediately be destroyed in a clash of Tempo No Tempo-style tape loops, Ween-ish vocal effects and Willie Kizart-style guitar fuzz.
The fact is, Afro-Americans playing rock music used to be the rule, it’s only become rare in the last two decades. Without it we would not have the maven Jimi Hendrix to influence Dragons of Zynth. Without that complicated series of interconnected events this review could not exist and for that rich history we give our thanks.
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