Here in New Orleans it’s carnival time. Nearly every night this week there are parades all over the city. Once you’ve been to enough of these parades, they lose a lot of their appeal, and as that happens your focus draws away from the flashy floats and the beads flying through the air and towards one of the most underappreciated facets of New Orleans culture: the high school marching bands. The New Orleans tradition of small brass ensembles have been slowly getting more of their due, but these marching bands don’t cut albums and are rarely experienced outside of carnival. 

So close to being able to say "Release the Kraken". Anyway, Z and the K's are a trad surf band out of Copenhagen playing 100% covers, including some from the 90's and onwards. I was surprised at how naturally they could fit songs by The Atlantics, The Ghastly Ones and Man or Astro-man right next to more standardized surf standards like Pipeline and Squad Car. Speaking of cohesiveness, the second half of the album was live but a nice enough recording that the talking before and after the track was the main giveaway.

Everything that The Tremolo Beer Gut has released so far has been quality from start to finish, and this is no exception. This is a live album, all one take or as their drummer put it to me "All is recorded on the same night and all we recorded ended up on the LP". And it sounds exactly like a live album ought to: crisp, all parts audible, energetic, and with the sound of the room clearly audible. They all sounded pretty faithful to the album versions to me, except with more hootin' and hollerin' from the crowd and the band.

When you're always on the lookout for surf groups, it helps to have a good gut feeling for them based on the name of the band and album, maybe even the songs. That's true for both the new stuff and the vintage stuff. The Baltic Side would have failed that test: The band name doesn't sound surf, "Hope" isn't really something I associate with surf, neither are song titles like "Believe", "Pilgrim", and "Rainbow". Nothing wrong with those names, they just don't register as a blip on my surf radar.