King Cotton

It’s tempting to unconditionally dismiss Jamie “King” Colton as a leather-clad freakazoid. Maybe it’s the cover art for the Pompano Beach guitarist’s Strange Twist album (apparently rendered via Baby’s First Photoshop!) that dooms it before a note is struck. This one-man (plus a Flying V and a leather cowboy hat) project revolves around Colton’s rip-snortin’ riffage and vaguely apocalyptic lyrics — “Another land, another time, oil rich, what’s mine is mine/Forever fight until the end, in body bags you they’ll send,” he warns in “Survival of the Fittest.” Too much cable news for Mr. Colton! He’s also penned a nearly incomprehensible parable for the liner notes — something about how he foresaw the events of 9/11 and relies heavily on “the training manuel [sic] Basic Instruction Before Leaving Earth (BIBLE).” The truly interesting thing about Strange Twist is that Colton’s so far removed from reality that he puts a great deal of misdirected passion into his music, which is basically nothing more than a karaoke take on recycled hits from Blue Oyster Cult and Bad Company. After a while, Colton shouting himself hoarse about how he “likes jet planes that move at the speed of sound” over his pungently squealing guitar starts feeling like a shot of Novocain in the upper palate: You experience pain at first; then you’re just numb and inarticulate.