“Ready Set Go” From Rockers King Falcon

A slightly distorted electric guitar opens “Ready Set Go,” the new single and music video from rockers King Falcon, in a haze that will linger over the track for the duration of its playing time. There’s an angsty mood to this melody that grows stronger and stronger as the louder element in the drums enters the picture, vocals interspersed between the ridges in the groove we’re finding in the center of the arrangement.

Suddenly and without warning, the floodgates are open, and a deluge of potency pours out of the speakers. For a moment, it feels like we’re drowning in the beautifully controlled chaos that is the metallic harmony dominating center stage, but this feeling doesn’t last for long. King Falcon is intent on dragging us across this ocean of tonality no matter how intense it may get, and in the next few minutes, they show us just how committed they are to both this task, and more pressingly, the goal of showing us what they can do when they’re firing on all cylinders.

There’s not a lot of over-the-top grandiosities to the music video for “Ready Set Go;” it’s been stylized with a certain Hollywood-style fluff that, although being rather familiar to a critic like myself, makes every shot look and feel larger than life. This liberal approach taken by the band doesn’t minimize the impact of the narrative in the song – quite the opposite.

As we ride the raging riptide of a rhythm into the ebb and flow of grooves, there’s never a moment where we feel like we’re listening to something that doesn’t sync up well with the imagery on our screen which isn’t always the case in a new rock video, mainstream or otherwise. You can tell that while King Falcon wasn’t overthinking the production process involved in structuring this piece, they were also careful to avoid the pitfalls of making an overly straightforward music video. This is a substance-driven affair, and for a generation that has produced a lot of filler, it couldn’t be arriving at a more appropriate time.

I was only somewhat familiar with King Falcon before I picked up my copy of “Ready Set Go” just recently, but I’m admittedly hooked on their sound now. They hold nothing back from us in this track, lyrically or instrumentally, and though they dabble in bold experimentations concerning how they produced the music video for the song, it comes out as one of the sharpest products that they’ve attached their moniker to thus far.

There aren’t a lot of bands making the kind of aggressive, distorted rock that these guys are at the moment, but if their style of attack influences even a fraction of their peers moving forward, I think that their scene will be much better for it. 2023 needed a little more brutality amongst melodic heavy groups of note, and in “Ready Set Go,” listeners get exactly what they’ve been craving for most if not all of the year in music as I’ve been following it so far.

Nicole Killian