For most followers of pop culture, the British ’60s produced little more than a few scattered bands – namely the Beatles, Who and Rolling Stones – as well as a great setting and premise for a couple Mike Meyers movies. For the pop cultural elite, however, it’s a gold mine of cult pop treasures, from the Kinks to The Small Faces. It’s an easy assertion to say that The Asteroid No. 4 are members of that cultural elite.
Although the band’s debut, Introducing … (1999, Lounge) as well the preceding EP from which many of the songs on this album are culled, Apple Street, showed glimmers of psychedelic rock, the Four have settled down to a sound that’s much more content to explore the intricacies of modish ’60s rock with the occasional psychedelic flourish. It’s a transition that takes the band from the realm of The Brian Jonestown Massacre into that of The Lilys (whose Kurt Heasley stepped in to produce this album.): there’s still all the glistening psychedelic rock, though this time around, The Asteroid No. 4 has a few more tools in its bag of tricks.
While fans of bands like the Lilys and the songwriting of Dave Davies will have a field day frolicking in the space between the band’s classic fuzz tones and bubbly bass lines, the Four don’t aim to reinvent psychedelic rock as much as reduce it to its most basic elements: While there’s few, if any, new wrinkles in the psychedelic picture on King Richard’s Collectibles, the band manages to either put its raw materials together with enough fresh-faced enthusiasm to rock up a poppy number ("Apple Street") or wrangle through a burner ("Gotta Find a Better Way"). However, the band veils its inspirations too thinly, be it the sharp thrust of the Kinks guitars or biting lyrics ("Mercenary Man" and "Local Fashion Junky") or the unsurprising similarity to Lilys songs ("King Richard") to make it more than a second-tier psych-pop act.
As followers of the band already know, King Richard’s Collectibles drops much of the varied instrumentation that made the band’s debut have such an Eastern feel to it. Outside of a poorly placed song with a droning flute at its center ("Poor Man’s Falls"), the scattered use of horns and other additional bits and pieces mesh easily with the Asteroid sound.
King Richard’s Collectibles is a fun trip, though one most psychedelic fans have already taken – if not in the totally combined motion of the Four, but at least in several smaller legs on previous records.
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