The Best Around Archives - KUT & KUTX Studios

When decades of dominos fall before some of your finest work, it’s hard not to feel like fate led you to this moment. Just look at Austin songwriter Camron Rushin, whose grandfather worked with Lefty Frizzell producer Jim Beck way back in the ’50s. Within Rushin’s generation, there’d been about a ten-year-long break between artistic projects, but once he started sharing sketches with multi-instrumentalists Todd Pruner and Jon Merz at the start of the pandemic, the foundation was laid for The Best Around. If you couldn’t guess from the trio’s handle or their cutout ransom note/collage visual aesthetic, they’re not brazenly boasting about their abilities; they’re more navigating life like triplet Daniel-sans perfecting their musical martial art one waxing tune at a time. In wearing belts of both performer and audience member, The Best Around show up to the ongoing competition that is our Live Music Capital with a diverse style of art-rock. Last Friday The Best Around rolled out their ninth studio single total and first of 2023, one that features harmony vocals from Emma Kate, percussion from Josh Halpern and mastering from Cacophony Recorders’ Erik Wofford. A melancholy masterpiece from its first downbeat through its pre-chorus falsetto and cosmic Americana instrumental bridge all the way to its concluding chord, “Lie to Me” might honestly be The Best Around’s very best to date.

From the surrealist theatrics of Oingo Boingo and Devo to the esoteric lyricism of Hunky Dory, it seems that not taking yourself seriously can give you a big leg up in the world of art rock. And as with the escapism given to us by those ’70s and ’80s greats, modern day art rockers like Austin’s The Best Around cross the wires between absurdist, non-sequitur humor and biting social commentary. In Spring 2020, Ten years after his indie punk outfit Safeword tapped out, singer-songwriter Camron Rushin created The Best Around along with multi-instrumentalists Todd Pruner (of English Teeth and Kodachrome) and Jon Merz (of Montopolis, My Jerusalem, and Soul Track Mind). They began exchanging stems of new songs and building up arrangements remotely, one instrument at a time, in accordance with pandemic-mandated social distancing. That patience (cue Karate Kid training montage music) lends itself to the work ethic of The Best Around, whose uncouth goofiness may cause cursory critiques to overlook the trio’s underlying discipline.

With Cobrai Kai making its fifth season premiere this Friday and Karate Kid culture back in the zeitgeist, The Best Around are making the most of this moment of Kairos with a new studio single. It’s part of The Best Around’s upcoming debut full-length, which was mixed and mastered by Erik Wofford at Cacophony Recorders here in Austin and is set for release sometime in the next several months. This latest one is a testament to the fact that there’ll never be a demand shortage for breakup songs, and there’ll always be another, more irreverent way to bid farewell to a former fling. Layered with LFO synth flairs, Fastball-style group vocals, bluesy guitar, and mid-’90s Beck-esque production techniques, “Kissing Your Ass” (and its soon-to-be-shared music video) is a perfect funk-rock complement to pop breakup bangers like “thank u, next”.