Electric Peace
Road To Peace

We who love rock know that sometimes it's not the famous figures who make the history of this music, it's often those hidden in the shadows who come up with the most genuine ideas, and then perhaps the current "artist" takes inspiration from it and is able to develop it according to the coordinates of mass taste.

Well, do you know Brian Kild? I'd bet my turntable that you don't. He is (or was?) a lanky guy almost two meters tall, with a Mephistophelean mustache and goatee on a thin face like an angry Jack Nicholson, hair slicked back with a receding hairline that reveals a tattooed eye right on the top of his head.

In 1985 in a Los Angeles dominated by glam groups like Guns'n Roses and Faster Pussycat, it's hard for a non-metal hard rocker to make ends meet. Brian lives on the edge of legality in a studio apartment on Highland Avenue saturated with gasoline fumes, has a passion for motorcycles and fast cars, and has a couple of disassembled bikes in front of the entrance, which he'll later put back together with modifications. He plays the bass and hangs around the Enigma Records scene, and from this, he manages to get a mini-LP printed with a band formed with his alcoholic friend Greg Walsh on guitar and an employee of the same Enigma on drums, Rick Winward. The poor sales advise Enigma not to publish the already ready album, "Road to Peace" and so the group disbands. Two years later, Brian manages to reform it with another loser of the Los Angeles scene, the great blues guitarist Honey Davis, who has little to do with the Electric Pace sound, and two new LPs are born: "Medieval Mosquito" and "Insectcide".

In 1989 thanks to the sales of these records, the old "Road to Peace" can finally be published, awakened from a four-year coma right after being conceived. Seven tracks, seven, steeped in a toxic mix of hyper hard rock, blues, and psychedelia.

"Drinkin'and Drivin' Till the Day I Die" comes from Brian's sick fantasy of being killed by a cop, the beautiful slide eases the torrid atmosphere. "Just for Once" and "I Don’t Feel Sorry" are pervaded by paranoid riffs scarred by the acid solos of the guitar. "Work So Hard" will make your crystal shake with Brian's granite bass. The acoustic "Angel" has something doorsian about it but Morrison never sang about a suicidal girl and a man who can only forget her by killing himself in turn.

Extraordinarily alive music, that already in 1985 carried within the seeds of other trends yet to come. Now that I don't know what has become of Brian Kild and no internet will ever be able to help me, tell me what I should do with this sick record. I only know that if I met him somewhere, I would shake his hand because in a rock scene where billionaires "play" at being damned, he always has been damned and is destined to chase it all his life.

If he managed not to get killed by that cop, I hope he finds peace somehow.