It is another cold evening, and he is in London rehearsing in preparation to tour Man Alive!, his third album as King Krule. “I left this city and went up there and it feels great,” he says as we settle at a table in the pub near his mum’s house back south, to the west of Peckham Rye. What on earth was the flame-haired singer up to, miles from his south London home, his Fender Mustang hanging loosely over his shoulder? As it turns out, Marshall has a new stomping ground these days, having moved to the north-west after his partner became pregnant in 2018, to be closer to her family. With the sun setting over its chimneys, he picked out drowsy notes on his guitar, singing deeply over the top. Behind him, smoke curled into the wintry sky above Fiddlers Ferry power station. Marshall still has a blood-freezing voice, someone to pay attention to, but 6 Feet Beneath the Moon doesn't feel like his Big Statement, not yet.S ome time towards the end of 2019, Archy Marshall, AKA King Krule, found himself in Warrington standing on a wide stretch of ankle-high grass. Over the course of 6 Feet's 52 minutes, the sound loses some of its essential mystery. The only issue with 6 Feet Beneath the Moon is that Marshall's sound is still a little inchoate, and you get a few compelling ideas rattling around loosely like pocket change, searching for a joining place. There are some departures here, and they don't work well: a re-recorded version of the old Zoo Kid "A Lizard State" brings in a manic horn section to crash the party and Marshall punches up some of the least appealing lyrics he's ever written with an extra pinch of Tom Waits, yowling "Where's the fucking fat bitches" and "I'm gonna tear you apart from the inside to the out." Some of his earlier material is included ("Out Getting Ribs" and "Ocean Bed") and it still rings out as some of his strongest work. He loves rap, and some of the word tangles here suggest an interest in the way rappers get to fling around vivid clumps of language: "The brain lives on but the vibes are dead/ Corrosively tread through emotionally spoonfed purpose," from "Neptune Estate". The lyrics read terribly, but even these "Hang in There" clichés are intriguingly dented by the sound of his voice. "When positivity seems hard to reach/ I keep my mouth shut/ Because when you're going through Hell/ You just keep going," he yowls on "Easy Easy". His lyrics occasionally play with clichés, and the way they emerge mangled from his vocal chords. Marshall has name-checked Chet Baker in interviews, and you can hear in "Baby Blue" what Baker's influence means to him: The song is flickering, low-lit, and romantic in a knowingly dime-store sort of way. The lovely, drunken ballad "Baby Blue" turns on velvet, indigo guitar chords and a gently swooning vocal melody.
Also like Brock, he sounds warily intelligent, and though he projects a surly air, his songs are tender at the root. Something in Marshall's stance reminds me vaguely of Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock like Brock, Marshall's words seem to escape his gut like odd-angled shapes that hurt him as they exit. Marshall's voice is pushed further to the forefront, and he explores its gnarliest crags and catches. It is muted and watery and stark, with a few intriguing elements dancing up near the top of the mix's surface: The drum track on "Ceiling" that sounds like a broken sprinkler the muted jazz loop of "Bathed In Grey," the chirping "I just want you to know" vocal sample in "Will I Come." The music's surface swarms quietly with breaks, but nothing sounds busy or crowded, the way collage or pastiche-based music often does. But otherwise, this is the same chipped-brick urban landscape that Marshall prowled through on his EP. 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, his full-length debut, sounds roomier and warmer, and you can hear the music echo into the expansive room tone that McDonald brings to his work. Marshall recorded those early songs on a malfunctioning laptop now he's on True Panther (and XL Recordings in the UK), working with producer Rodaidh McDonald.
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