All Hail!: King Khan & The Shrines

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KING KHAN ISN'T actually royalty. He's more like a rock 'n' roll savior.

Flamboyant like Little Richard and wild like Jerry Lee Lewis, Khan moves with the intensity of James Brown and the relentless energy of Sam & Dave, and Khan sings with the howl of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators' Roky Erickson and the grit of Love's Arthur Lee. The members of his immense backing band, The Shrines, are his disciples, and their mission is to spread love through a heady, frenetic mix of styles and genres.

"The kind of music that we do is really pure rhythm-and-blues and gospel," Khan states emphatically. "We're doing American soul music." He refers to touring as "spreading the gospel" and reveals an unwavering belief in music's redemptive powers.

Born in Toronto, Arish Khan grew up obsessed with music — not only the Indian classical music his father played, but the oldies his mother played in the car as well. He joined his first band, The Spaceshits, and began touring heavily as a teenager. During a raucous trip to Europe, he fell in love with Berlin, so he relocated there and began recruiting musicians for a new group called The Sensational Shrines.

"It's like creating a family," Khan says. They quickly earned a reputation on the continent as a ferocious live act blending all styles of American music. The group soon dropped the Sensational from their name as redundant. How could they be anything but?

Due to the expense of traveling with a band numbering in the double digits, Khan has toured the States infrequently. His break-out album, "What Is?!," was originally released on tiny German indie Hazelwood Records back in 2007, but bootlegs swam the Atlantic and garnered high praise from American blogs and online publications.

Even as the band's profile continues to rises in the States, Khan emphasizes the grassroots approach to building up a fanbase.

"We don't get any radio," he said. "It's basically word of mouth. I think that's the classic rock 'n' roll way of promoting yourself. It's a much more honorable way than using corporate avenues."

The U.S. suddenly seemed conquerable, and the band signed with Vice Records, which released a singles compilation last year and gave "What Is?!" its domestic release in April. Ranging from Kinksy garage-rock like "Take a Little Bit" to Doorsy astral-sexual projections like "69 Faces of Love," the album is Khan's inimitable calling card. It's often hilarious, but never a joke, always rowdy but more inclusive than confrontational. Rave-ups "Land of the Freak" and "I Wanna Be a Girl" gallop at breakneck pace into the girl-group symphony of the surprisingly sweet "Welfare Bread" and finally into closer "The Ballad of Lady Godiva," which throbs tantrically with tabla-like guitars.

"What Is?!" sounds like it could have been made at any time during the past 50 years (well, maybe not during the '80s). It's not just the recording quality — although even on CD it has the warmth of vinyl — but more crucially the affectionate way the band blends so many genres with so little regard for passing trends.

That said, the album has nothing on Khan's live shows, which are loud, sweaty, manic affairs. It's a visual as well as a musical experience: The band dresses in costumes, a cheerleader cavorts around the stage, and Khan holds court in outlandish attire: one day a leisure suit with Kanye shades, the next a cape, short shorts, and a gold headdress.

However extravagant the concert, says Khan, "I don't want to go too over the top. There's a fine line between what feels right and what is too much."

What ultimately makes Khan's music more than a crate-digging exercise and his shows more than spectacle is his belief in the power of music.

"For me it's almost religious," he says. "It's like saving your soul. That's essentially what music has the power to do. When you've got 12 people in the band and you're traveling all over the places, it's obvious we're not really doing it for the money. We're doing it for the love of it and we're spreading that love to so many people."

» 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW; with Mark Sultan; Wed., 10 p.m., $15; 202-265-0930. (U St.-Cardozo)

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo courtesy Vice Records