King Krule, The OOZ
The first thing you notice about King Krule is that he doesn’t look how he sounds. During a November 2017 appearance on late night TV to kick off his North American tour, Archy Marshall, the King himself, wandered the stage like a drunk. Rod-thin with tousled orange hair and crooked teeth, Marshall looks more grade school gremlin than melancholic frontman. But when he approaches the microphone, the mismatch is startling: that voice — dark, deep, and gravely like it’s been drowned in cheap beer and made coarse by unfiltered cigarettes — couldn’t possibly belong to this pipsqueak, could it?
But once the music begins, the combination is seamless; it’s a wonder we doubted it at all. So too is the case with The OOZ, King Krule’s third full-length release. Marshall first came to fame in 2011 with the release of an eponymous EP, on which he demonstrated his broad musical vocabulary — from jazz harmonies to hip-hop beats to punk vocals. On this latest album, that jagged mix achieves a coherence not always felt on previous records. Marshall produces more than a sound on The OOZ. He builds a world.
It is a world of late nights and anguished thoughts. “Biscuit Town,” the album’s opening track, mixes hip-hop inflected drums with interlocking guitar riffs. On “Dum Surfer,” cavernous drones, undulating in and out of earshot like the roars of mammoth beasts, match a surfer beat and dub bass while a clean electric guitar punctuates the track with bright harmonies. Marshall’s voice is not a singer’s voice, and on this song, as on most, he doesn’t bother protecting it from strain. It gets warped and distorted, as much by audio FX as by what you might call, oxymoronically, his “vocal technique.” He warbles his lyrics like an anhedonic lounge singer.
The OOZ, it turns out, is the perfect title for this collection of sludgy songs. The theme of the sea and sinking in its vast depthness pervades Marshall’s rhetoric of loneliness and detachment. “You’re shallow waters, I’m the deep seabed,” he croons on the album’s opener. “Slush Puppy,” a haunting soliloquy on mental illness, begins with a whisper and ends with a yell: “I’m down under the sea,” Marshall sings in duet with singer-songwriter Okay Kaya. “Nothing’s working with / me,” he shouts. Songs like “Half Man, Half Shark” and “Midnight 01 (Deep Sea Diver)” further the theme. “Why’d you leave me? Because of my depression?” Marshall asks coolly, on the latter. It’s unclear whether the singer wants to rise to the surface or dive further into the muck. Either way, we ourselves are submerged.
And yet, through the bleakness, there’s always the suggestion of light. In general, Marshall’s guitar arrangements are spare but gorgeous — punctuating the thick haze of the low-end bass and drums. On “Midnight 01 (Deep Sea Diver),” these careful harmonies give melodic (and perhaps emotional) support to the distressed vocal. And for all its grit and gravel, Marshall’s voice often achieves a haunting, quavering beauty. On “Logos,” a kick drum pulsates like a heartbeat while Marshall half-sings, half-raps over layers of electric guitar, pillowy synths, and errant sax licks. Partway through, a drum kit enters in a bossa nova rhythm — a reminder that being alive means more than just a pulse.
All this explains one final anomaly: the album’s cover. It depicts a blue sky crossed by a single, pink contrail. Recently, Marshall made a request on social media for fans to send him photos like the cover. He’s uploaded the better ones to an Instagram account, which has quickly become a patchwork of sky blues and cloud whites. In addition to their music, social media has given artists a tool to project their persona into the world. So it’s odd — in the same way the album cover is odd — that Marshall has chosen to curate a social-media monument to something as whimsical as sky-gazing. But the Instagram page seems to suggest something that The OOZ reiterates in its tenderest moments: in the face of anguish, sometimes merely looking up is enough.
