Thomas Jefferson Cowgill performs under the name King Dude - American musician, singer and songwriter. In his work he inherits the aesthetics of Charles Bukowski and southern Gothic , the musical customs of Johnny Cash , Nick Cave , Tom Waits , Mark Lanegan , Leonard Cohen . Musical critics characterize King Dude's style as “funeral blues” and “apocalyptic folk”, the artist is described as “ Seattle peddler of diabolical rock music,” while Thomas Cowgill himself believes in his soul that his songs are closest to gospel (Christian music) .
| King dude | |
|---|---|
 | |
| basic information | |
| Birth name | Thomas Jefferson Cowgill |
| A country |  USA |
| Professions | |
| Years of activity | 1998 - present time |
| Singing voice | |
| Instruments | |
| Genres | alt country , neofolk , garage rock |
| Labels | Not Just Religious Music, Ván Records |
King Dude texts cover the themes of sin and salvation , the confrontation of God and the Devil ; they often feature motifs of occultism and images of traditional American folklore, such as witches and ghosts . The performer’s gloomy low voice is described as “a hoarse growl”, “an ominous croak”, etc. In addition to music, Cowgill also designs clothes and directs Actual Pain.
Biography
A considerable influence on the formation of the personality of Thomas Cowgill was made by his father, a guitarist in a folk group and a zealous Christian who encouraged his son to study Gnostic texts, the history of religion, and the formation of Catholicism. Thomas Jefferson gained his first musical experience in the hardcore and black / death bands Teen Cthulhu and Book of Black Earth. Since 2010, he began performing as a solo musician under the pseudonym King Dude. Common signs for the whole atmospheric sound of this solo project is the acoustic base interspersed with noise recorded in the “field conditions”: the whistle of the wind, the sound of church bells, the sound of the wheels of a train.
The first King Dude CDs - Tonight's Special Death and Love - went through relatively unnoticed music critics. The performer attracted the attention of the international press only with the release of the third album, Burning Daylight , in which King Dude presented the audience with a “gravel-voiced meditation on death and love on the edge of being.” In their reviews of the disc, reviewers often called the musician a "horror version of Johnny Cash" or "suffering from laryngitis Tom Waits." The goal of the fourth disc King Dude defined the creation of "as creepy music as possible." Critics found the roots of the Fear style on The Birthday Party , The Gun Club, and Death in June . In those same years, Cowgill decided to create a duet to match Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra , and the California singer and songwriter Chelsea Woolf helped fulfill this desire.
The fifth album Songs Of Flesh & Blood - In The Key Of Light was the most personal for the musician, as well as the first, on the cover of which he placed his photo. King Dude is farther and farther away from the raw acoustic sound of early works, now in his recordings you can hear keyboards: piano , organ , mellotron , exquisite strings - viola and violin , as well as such exotic instruments as a tambourine or vibraphone . The sixth record, Sex , is entirely devoted to the topic in the title. The sound of the disc ranges from old-fashioned rock and roll and punk rock to post-punk , gothic rock and even proto-punk .
Discography
|
|
|
Sources
|
|