This is something of a departure for Kaki King. Okay, it’s not a totally unexpected departure as the guitarist’s 2008 album, ‘Dreaming of Revenge’ provided enough road signs, but it is still no less surprising to hear all those desultory jazz signatures and fret-wobbling vagaries coalesce into actual songs, and rock songs, for that matter. Sure, there had always been the basic germ of an angry, misanthropic slacker type burrowing around in her gentle, and frustratingly instrumental ruminations about life straddling the gender divide but seldom were they as grizzly as this. And whereas it used to be the case that Kaki would lift the occasional whisper for only one or two songs on the album, she now pumps out her lungs on most of them. In fact, it’s all rather like having Harold Lloyd turn to the camera and scream, such is the remarkableness of the transformation.
Pitched somewhere between the woozy spit and grit of Montreal’s ‘Land of Talk’ and the ethereal grunge of Sonic Youth, songs like ‘The Betrayer’ and ‘Falling Day’ bring the prog-rock franchise bang up to speed with riffs as wiry as Steve Howe’s and venom as poisonous as a bagful of asps with King’s choppy waters only occasionally calmed by the somnolent and wistful psychedelia of ‘The Hoopers of Hudspeth’ and the rippling arpeggios of ‘My Nerves That Committed Suicide’. Like a river, the record’s journey is influenced but not controlled by its surroundings; it carves its own niche in its own time.
‘Junior’ is a fairly bookish proposition, but not overly wordy, King preferring the youthful malapropisms and mispronunciations of innocence than anything close to verbosity. The closest parallel I could draw is Willy Vlautin’s ‘Thirteen Cities’ – like Carlos Fuentes set to music – but this time with leather wristbands.
I know one thing; this river is certain to burst.