King Krule - King Krule

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release
Soundclips
Tracklist

1 - 363N63
2 - Bleak Bake
3 - Portrait In Black And Blue
4 - Lead Existence
5 - The Noose Of Jah City

4...according to our Clinton on Fri 06 Jan, 2012.

Phil - he know me too well. He say Clint - you gonna like dis shit! I say nawwww I hate de kid Krule and de Coconuts!!! Ahem - enough of this borderline racist patois. I'm not sure what came over me. I offer my full and frank apology. I don't know who these people are and nor do I care but I'm liking this slab o' wax. The first track here is magnificent. A haunting guitar meander with nods towards Ducktails and the like. Dreamy, simple guitar arpeggio's lost in the ether between Vini Reilly's hair and Chessie's more melodic, less beat driven instrumental compositions. From there on a sleepy stoned voice comes into the equation, I would have never thought that this voice came out of that pale, fiery headed lad I've been reading about in the smug, middle class newspapers. It's deep, London accented, with a bit of Joe Strummer/Mick Jones in there but also a profound hip hop influence, the music is interesting and edgy enough to be hauled off in disgrace at dinner parties, this is none of your James Blake shit, the music is lovely and blurry, the best comparison from a quick web scrat saw Rolling Stone suggest it was like waking up at the dentists after being heavily sedated. The overall feel is of a slurred, heavily medicated chap waking up and tinkering around with some guitar chords and hip hop beats, dousing the thing in echo and drifting back to bed.

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“Oddly intimate and irrevocably bleak... he makes deceptively simple, deeply personal/political art that finds joy – perhaps its only joy – in accident and chaos” – 8.0 on Pitchfork, Best New Music
“Heartache cloaked in cavernous reverb and a sneer...preparation for beckoning world domination” – NME

The follow-up to his debut single “Out Getting Ribs” this EP demonstrates expansion of vision, both musically and thematically. The connective tissue between these five tracks is still Marshall’s stark, direct lyrics, but over the span of the self-titled EP, there is an arresting sonic progression, as his songs open up to become a loose knit meditation and renewal of hope in the face of desperation. Shades of The Streets’ plainspoken and observant ramble dance with the heart on sleeve confessions/cultural critiques of Billy Bragg. Archy’s influences are a patchwork for his voice to lay in, woven from several generations music as divergent as the 80s romantics, jazz, no wave and dub.

The first vocal track ‘Bleak Bake’, for instance, opens with levitating keyboards and Marshall clearing his throat, before sampled strings and 808 drum ‘pooms’ swoon in and he sighs. ‘The Noose of Jah City’ drives the knife in deeper -some of his most intoxicating incantations to date- with Marshall singing of being “suffocated in concrete” over a lushly upholstered backdrop of chiming guitars and shuffling sampled beats. While in the gorgeous ‘Portrait in Black and Blue’ he unleashes a bounding piece of classic croon.

Taken as a whole, the “King Krule” EP is the sound of a young man growing up and attempting to grapple with the realities of the world he inhabits, and a fascinating, brutal journey it is too.