(XL Recordings)The south Londoner’s third album offers flashes of brilliance but is weighed down by a tone of gravelly gloom
King Krule, AKA 25-year-old south
London native Archy Marshall, has always let his work sprawl. His 2013 debut, 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, was a staggeringly novel and sometimes exquisite mashup of laptop hip-hop, smoky jazz and folk-punk, yet it was also loose and listless: a collection of guitar figures and gravelly moans that periodically coalesced into greatness.
Man Alive!, his third album as King Krule, maintains many facets of his still beguiling original sound – the uneasy synth washes, the foregrounded strumming, his bassy rasp. But the fragments of melody and bursts of momentum that carried his previous material (2017’s The Ooz was pretty impressionistic but at least featured some singalong segments) have largely gone. Instead, Man Alive! is mainly concerned with evoking disgust, dissolution and despair via vague choruses, eerie vocal samples and dogged dissonance.