Album by Kid Congo Powers & The Pink Monkey Birds

This album feels like the soundtrack to a western that takes place after the end of the world.

Everything about it gives off this strange, cinematic energy — like the desert survived civilization and all that’s left are drifters, ghosts, punk rockers, and people who think they’re living inside a twisted version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Musically, the album pulls from garage rock, punk, surf music, rockabilly, Latin rhythms, psychedelic music, and spoken word performance, but it never feels chaotic for the sake of being weird. There’s a real atmosphere holding everything together.

“East of East” opens things with a tense instrumental that immediately made me think of something from the Kill Bill soundtrack. It feels like the moment before a duel in some dusty futuristic border town and instantly sets the tone for the rest of the record.

“Wicked World” was one of the first major highlights for me. The bass and drums hit hard, the duet vocals with Alice Bag are fantastic, and the whole thing somehow sounds retro and futuristic at the same time. It gave me flashes of a darker, stranger version of The B-52’s filtered through punk and garage rock.

“The Boy Had It All” is probably the closest thing the album has to a straight-up crowd pleaser. The riff is infectious, the drums absolutely slap, and the song gradually builds into this explosive finish that really lands. At times it reminded me of Lou Reed.

“Silver for My Sister” leans harder into punk-country and rockabilly territory while still carrying that cinematic desert atmosphere. It feels like the soundtrack to someone crossing a wasteland alone at sunset.

“Ese Vicio Delicioso” blends Latin grooves with crunchy garage rock in a way that perfectly captures the album’s personality. The spoken-style vocals drift through the music while the chanting chorus gives the song a hook that sticks immediately.

“The Smoke Is the Ghost” slows things down into something much moodier and more psychedelic. The layered English and Spanish spoken vocals create this hypnotic atmosphere while the surf guitars and spaghetti-western textures keep the song feeling grounded in the album’s strange desert world.

“Never Said” ended up being one of the most emotionally affecting songs here. It has this dreamy, romantic 50s quality to it, but there’s also something slightly sinister underneath the sweetness.

Then the album closes with a seventeen-minute atmospheric piece that strips away much of the punk and garage-rock energy and fully commits to the psychedelic side of the record. If the rest of the album feels like a strange western film, this final track feels like the moment where reality completely dissolves and you finally see the unsettling truth underneath everything.

It’s experimental, weird, stylish, and surprisingly immersive.

More than anything, That Delicious Vice feels like a world you briefly get pulled into rather than just a collection of songs. If you let it seduce you, it becomes one hell of a trip.

Verdict: Good

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