Review Summary: Slide into gauze..
It’s all too easy to make pre-emptive existential assumptions when a musician ditches a moniker and records an album under his birth-name. A listener can’t help but wonder if the new project carries more personal attachment, or if a drastic change in style warranted a new name on the album jacket, or whether the musician felt too old to trade in pseudonyms. So it went with King Krule who used his actual name of Archy Marshall to put out his sophomore full-length
A New Place 2 Drown, the follow-up to 2013’s
6 Feet Beneath the Moon, a spare collection of spiny guitar tracks, Krule half-rapping, half-singing over it. Whatever Marshall was trying to accomplish with the nominal switch-up, he gets there much more empirically with
Place 2 Drown, a stellar, languid collection of hip-hop, doused in the moody smog of London streets.
In contrast to
6 Feet’s string tack,
Place 2 Drown’s musical direction cuts closer to Marshall’s initial passion – a twist of the kind of sullen, dreamy instrumentals Rawkus Records alumni Black Star and Company Flow favoured in their heyday, and twitchy, stifling dub. Scattershot art-drums shuffle and jerk around in odd patterns, and ragged synths slide in and out uninvited. Each note on the record seems unhurried and jittery at once, snarling together into the sort of anodyne tracks H-heads can rock to.
Swell is one of the only tracks on
Drown with a steadfast rhythm, and it benefits greatly from it, riding one uninterrupted wavelength, smooth and assured. But the album’s warped patterning is no crutch. Though it proceeds at a leisurely pace, its off-kilter sway needles at the eardrums, prickling the knees and lulling the brain. Every song unwraps like an ephedrine capsule cracking.
For how sepia-toned the music sounds, there are moments when it becomes unsettling and frigid and tense.
Sea Liner MK 1 is unrelenting, a glum and menacing affair, the picture of a night’s out darker closing turns; heaving in an alleyway, waiting wobbly-legged for a cab, dreading the head terrors of morning.
Buffed Sky’s background is filled out by roaming atmospherics and skittish static, Marshall moaning about the tribulations of screwing a girl with a boyfriend bent on caving in his head with a
chrome bat.
None of the songs stick around for long, but the changeless tone and rhythm makes them tress into one cohesive whole. Marshall’s lyricisms are similarly minimalistic, stringing a few jaunty rhymes together and generally letting the music guide the mood. His themes rotate around romantic missteps and sexual torpor, passed through the bratty filter of bored youth. It all works well for him. On the lazily propulsive
Eye’s Drift, he mutters
She defines my exist
Put a cigarette and divided her lips
She walks by, she’s pissed
She caught me on the corner getting higher than a bitch.
The two-act closer
Thames Water,
Drown’s longest cut , is a collection of eloquent soundbites set over a dying pulse, Marshall intoning by turns:
She looks as if she knows
My blood is good.
Somethin' in the water contorted her mind
Distorted on the border with war in our eyes
This inner city life treats me like ***.
and
Girl, this place is evil.
It all builds a paradoxical set, a young kid stuck in a romantically post-apocalyptic London, too pissed and idle to do anything about it, too stoned to care.
Marshall’s voice is the strongest feather in his cap. Thick and angular and rough, it does little to reveal the scrawny kid behind it. It sits as perfectly here, amid these opiated electronic systoles, as it did with the sombre picking on
6 Feet.
Place 2 Drown also shows him as a promising young producer, and he is clearly more at home looping and dubbing than he is messing around on guitar. The album opens up ample space for him grow into.
For now we have this. A strung-out, translucent dreamscape from the classiest chav around.
