Hollywood Kenny :: Destroyer
For the last quarter century, LA-based singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer Kenneth Andrew Woods has had a harmonious helping hand in bringing several stars’ works to the surface without so much as coming up for air to fill his own lungs with the atmospheric air he had grown accustomed to capturing so well. Having worked with the likes of Beck, who he briefly played with before deciding to start his very own group Old Hickory, Pavement, Ben Harper, a personal favorite, Sonic Youth and Robyn Hitchcock, to name a few, at the legendary Bright Street Recorders studio, which he was a co-owner of for nearly a decade, Woods has finally given himself the creative chance to release his own music out into the weird and wild winds of the world under the solo moniker Hollywood Kenny. While simultaneously coexisting in the turbulent times of the pandemic, struggles with substance, death, homelessness, cultural chaos, and personal purgatories, the veteran artist has come full circle through the cosmic cycle of the sonic storm, and out the other side with a cumbersome collection of songs and intense investments that will surely test the strength of your heart strings. Recorded in several locations and studios throughout California, like Haas studios, OCD Soundlabs, and an Airbnb, “Destroyer” sets out to burn down the town in a gorgeous glory that’s filled with harmonious history, never-ending nods to poetic peers, and critical contemporaries, and the spiritual sights and sounds of those familiar romantic realms that make the West Coast such a special place.
Woods’ eager ears and eyes have experienced all sides of the creative cube as it shifts from one color block to a paralyzing pattern that doesn’t hold a single candle to the fundamental flame of the beholder’s bravery, as they embrace their own deranged darkness through the anatomy of the arts. Throughout the album’s complicated core, a numbing narrative begins to unfold like a pair of vintage pants that have remained structurally silent and dormant in a coastal closet as a well-kept secret until now. Without condensing the ethereal essence of the album to a product of the pandemic, the music celebrates the existential existence in a harmonious head rush, where emotions collide with the secrets of the skull and exit through the lyrical lips. Featuring numbers like “Still Banned From LA”, “21st Century Blues”, “The Stranger”, and “Seeking Real Gods”, Hollywood Kenny’s “Destroyer” evaporates into the melodic mist just before screaming into the spiritual silence where the sky meets the earth in critical collusion.
