In 2013, Archy Marshall, better known by his stage name of King Krule, turned just about everyone’s head with his debut album 6 Feet Beneath The Moon. Released on Marshall’s nineteenth birthday, it was an incredible piece of work, especially from someone so young. It was unpredictable and volatile but also possessed a jazzy affectation that gave it a uniquely smooth dimension of swagger. But in following up the record, Marshall made a distinct change to his sound: 6 Feet had his voice front and center in every song, even the cloudier ones, but beginning with The OOZ, King Krule’s music has become far more amorphous, a shapeshifting miasma befitting that album’s name where vocals and instruments blended together to form something thick and hazy. It was quite the departure, but now, two albums later, Marshall and his band are touring Space Heavy: their fourth record, and one that better than anything before balances the competing tendencies of the creative process.
After a solo opening set courtesy of Jacob Read, a.k.a. JerkCurb – a member of the band Horsey alongside Archy’s elder brother John – Marshall and band emerge, saxophonist Ignacio Salvadores carrying a glowing object whose scent quickly reveals itself to be sage. He places it at the foot on his microphone stand next to two saxophones: a tenor and a much larger baritone, which Salvadores alternates between in addition to providing backing vocals. The opening salvo of songs is pulled entirely from 2020’s Man Alive!, and ‘Perfecto Miserable’ is an archetypal King Krule song, perhaps one you’d show to someone as an introduction – waterlogged in sadness, fixated as Marshall often is on loneliness and need between two parties. Atonal guitars envelop and often eclipse his voice, creating an unparalleled sense of space in the songs, bringing them to bear in the physical world.
This physicality is the art that Marshall has been tweaking and perfecting throughout these past three records; even in the packed, three-tiered, high-ceilinged room at the House of Blues in Boston, the effect remains powerful when the band plays the songs live. ‘Alone, Omen 3’ extends the opening vibe and brings in a trip-hop drum beat courtesy of George Bass, and then things become more solid when they arrive at ‘Cellular’, the Friday evening gig in its first escalating phase. The first two songs here use and reuse the word “alone”, one even the title, and the third ends with Marshall declaring he’s “abandoned to the voice in [his] head”.
The crowd is particularly excited when the band begins ‘Dum Surfer’, the reverb-laden title delivered by Marshall as he trades off parts of verses with bassist James Wilson. The horns characterize the song’s latter half, Salvadores hoisting even the larger one above his head at the end, and they return again in the following song, ‘Pink Shell’ – arguably the finest individual track from Space Heavy. It’s one that has been kicking around a while, too; Marshall has recorded under and otherwise adopted many different aliases, including Zoo Kid and Edgar the Beatmaker, and an early version of this track can be found as a relic from a project called Hypno Disk, which released it as ‘It’d Been’ in 2017. The title track from Space Heavy trafficks in extremes – its gently interwoven guitars and soft vocals start the song in a wave of familiar imagery: nothingness, the color blue, a thick, viscous liquid in which Marshall is submerged. But in its repeated chorus his voice rises to a snarl, and even at the back of the House of Blues, one can feel it come alive, raw and untamed.
There’s a long pause before they play the next song, which turns out to be ‘A Lizard State’ from 6 Feet. The perfectly jazzy guitars augmented with explosive horns make it one of the most uptempo songs of the night, and people crowd-surf accordingly while Marshall cleans up the lyrics just a bit on the fly, another pause arriving before they segue into the slow-jam ending that brings the audience down from the rushing high that came before, setting the mood for ‘Seaforth’. It too is a standout from Space Heavy and is actually the song from which the title derives. It’s another song for a love; their connection is the only thing that seems to be keeping Marshall tethered in a “broken” world. The space he names at its conclusion is crushing even as it’s nothing at all, an oxymoronic dimensionality that nonetheless makes immediate, intuitive sense to everyone who’s ever felt it. Once upon a time, noted interviewer Nardwuar asked Marshall: “Why should people care about King Krule?” Archy played it casually understated back then, but certainly, his lyricism is one of several easy answers one might give today. The way Marshall fleshes out this concept, going further in songs like ‘Our Vacuum’, makes it congruous to his earlier works; this continuity gives shape to his work as a whole.
Roughly two-thirds of the way into the night, the feel of the show changes dramatically once again, picking up with the early hit ‘Easy Easy’, a wider-lensed look at Marshall and the environs of his youth, epitomizing the tug-of-war between dread and optimism that coexist in those crucial years. The guitars of Marshall and Jack Towell sound out prominently, with just a hint of synth accompaniment from Jamie Isaac. Interestingly enough, the disco ball hanging from the ceiling had been tested before the show began, and it’s soon revealed why as it comes on in full swing for a performance of ‘Half Man Half Shark’, a positively raucous number anchored by the titular refrain that has been a somewhat rare appearance in the band’s setlist. The band ride this tonal shift further into the night, with ‘Rock Bottom’ and the trippy ‘Stoned Again’ accompanied by strobes that break the mood of the Friday night crowd, themselves notably young at a glance, wide open. One of at least three chants on the night of “Archy! Archy! Archy” begins after this run, and Salvadores is at the edge of the crowd with both microphone and saxophone at multiple points.
The set is notably long: two dozen songs in length by the time the night is over, few of which could be considered short. The place feels like a pocket universe, unconcerned with time; the band reportedly changed and added songs to the setlist midstream. Between the sheer length and the unpredictability and the Friday-night catharsis, it felt like something of an old-school show, a rough diamond in an era when things are often so optimized. The band closes with flexi-disc rarity ‘It’s All Soup Now’, which like ‘Space Heavy’ starts mellow and builds to a massive din, further extended as the band prolongs the final wall of sound for a few more seconds at a time. But they’ve got one final parting tune for which they return, and that’s ‘Out Getting Ribs’. “He’s submerged in doubt,” Marshall said even back in 2013 – always on the verge of being swallowed by some sea. In a discography full of pained builds to amazing payoffs, the final resounding guitars here are perhaps the band’s best, their tone perfectly suited to that of the song, which is itself an unequaled and fitting cap to an indelible evening of music.
Photos and Review by Collin Heroux
