Song of the Day: Naked Giants - Easy Eating

Every Monday through Friday, we deliver a different song as part of our Song of the Day podcast subscription. This podcast features exclusive KEXP in-studio performances, unreleased songs, and recordings from independent artists that our DJ’s think you should hear. Today’s song, featured on the Morning Show with John Richards, is “Easy Eating”, a recent single by Seattle band Naked Giants from their self-released EP Easy Eating.

Naked Giants - Easy Eating (MP3)

Punk shouldn't be clean. It's not some fuzz guitar and the occasional off-tempo cymbal crash but an indecipherable wall of wailing sounds set to a cacophony of banging sounds that used to be drums in a long-forgotten life. It's breaking bottles, the rasp of hair on a microphone from aggressive headbanging, the splatter of sweat. If you listen closely, you can hear someone's nose being broken in a mosh pit and them laughing it off. If that's punk, Seattle purebreds Naked Giants bring it in spades.

The title track from their Easy Eating EP is a 200-proof two-and-a-half minute tornado of garage rock that opens with the metronomic clicks of two drumsticks, surf-rock reverbed guitar, and the sound of someone laughing in the distance. The chorus is shout-along gold: "give me more-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh," the sound of the thousand crowded basement shows Naked Giants have been playing around the Emerald City on their quick rise to touring down to SXSW after coming in second at EMP's Sound Off! competition. There's a pureness to their sound, a refreshing youthful enthusiasm like they're the first punkers to ever punk, a completely un-ironic and unabashed immersion in a musical tradition nearly forty years old.

You can be immersed in Naked Giants' sound when they perform at Chop Suey in Seattle on April 7. They have a few dates before then in other states, including a stop at SXSW and at Treefort Music Festival in Boise. Check for more dates and music on their Facebook page. If you want to check out what their live show is like, watch this video from their performance at EMP's Sound Off! competition, where they won Second Place last year: