Kevin Jacks Band

Kevin Jacks Band would sound perfect if you stumbled into it at a bar you’d never been to before. The band’s debut starts off mellow, with Lee’s Summit singer and guitarist Kevin Jacks revealing his more introspective Big Head Todd side, before things get dirtier. By the time “Free” hits and Jacks is yelling, I’m free to fuck whoever I want, it’s easy to imagine a crowd of shot-fueled guys singing along with fists aloft in a Marlboro-scented wind. The strange and slightly grotesque “God, Country and Relationships” (which just might have an Adam Sandler cameo in the second verse) is exactly the right closing-time touch, the song that everyone sort of remembers the next day, though they secretly wonder if it was just a concoction of their booze-saturated minds. There are some missteps here, but KJB shows the beginnings of a group that, given time, could do real damage.