Album Review: Man Alive!- King Krule (2020)

Its Eraserhead with a happier ending.

July, 2023

With a new album brewing somewhere in the South London fog, I thought it would be interesting to revisit King Krule’s third LP, Man Alive! Released just a month before global hysteria brought on by the pandemic, Marshall’s 2020 album never saw the stage, as mandated lockdowns took effect and partly overshadowed its critical and commercial success. 

Known for his deep, guttural vocals, sunken lyricism, and an unshakeable South London accent, Archy Marshall has been a steady voice in modern music for well over a decade. Since adopting the royal moniker in 2011, Marshall has released four albums under the King Krule stage name, and several other projects under a myriad of different aliases, garnering a cult following in the process. 

Though relatively accessible, Marshall’s first LP, Six Feet Beneath the Moon, soaked in the bleakness of introspective lyrics and wet guitars while 2017’s The Ooz staggered in its catatonic portrayals of urbanite depression. Dreary as ever, Man Alive! is just as morose and even more volatile. Festering chords fall into one another as if exhausted by their own weight. Screams morph into crazed saxophone squeals. Riffs swell and cut through the rot. The album’s instability oscillates our somber narrator between states of deep depression, claustrophobia-induced frustration, and a faint sense of hopefulness swaddled somewhere in the filth and the muck.

The album opens with “Cellular,” a song as much about the pitfalls of calling an ex as it is the dangers of information overload and the digitization of the 21st century. Marshall eases us into his subterranean fever dream with lumbering major 7th chords that trail off into post-punk aggression. Stabbing telephone beeps accent skipping drums and coiling bass notes as Marshalls rumbles about losing signal and watching a massacre from the palm of his hand. The poppy sheen of Six Feet has been molted, and what's left behind is Marshall’s affinity for expertly mixed, Lynchian soundscapes that sour his music’s already murky waters.

Marshall builds upon the already hulking momentum in the following track “Supermarche.” 

Instrumentally barren and lyrically surreal, it's easily skippable on its own, but when considering the album as a whole, the song proves to be an essential stepping stone towards the rabid two-track sprint that is “Stoned Again” and “Comet Face,” a standout moment on the record. 

There is an acute sense of direction that previous albums lacked. Some complain that The Ooz is painfully lethargic to the point that it becomes tedious to listen to in its entirety, detesting the way Marshall seems to aimlessly bounce from one spacey motif to the next— all valid criticisms considering the album’s hefty, hour-long runtime. However, we see Marshall tighten his scope in Man Alive! The runtime alone is shaved down to a brief 40 minutes, and it seems as though the London artist has taken all of the abstract sounds and ideas that made The Ooz redeemable, and has refined them into something much more concise and focused. 

Each track feels essential to those preceding and following, a testament to Marshall’s aptitude for pacing and album-crafting. Songs bleed into the next, almost literally; “Comet Face” trails off with a sped-up voice mail recording that persists into the next track, “The Dream” where Marshall finds himself discombobulated by stability: “I wasn’t sure at all why our love becomes sorrow and withers free.” It’s one of the first glimpses of light on the album, and a kind of dividing interlude between the dizzying ferocity of the LP’s dismal four track opening and the cathartic optimism of its second half. Like the jazz music he frequently pulls from, Marshall understands the importance of tension and release. 

Though, following the shimmery hopefulness of “The Dream,” we are greeted with one of the weaker songs on the LP, “Perfecto Miserable,” a groggy love ballad whose muddy wall of sound seems to momentarily slow down the album’s momentum. On the following track, “Alone, Omen 3,” Marshall is unequivocally positive. He sings in a register higher than fans may have thought possible and there is a tenderness to his croak as he sings, “Don’t forget you’re not alone/ Deep in the metropole,” right before slumping back into the paranoid melancholy of “Slinky.” “I dreamt I was here before,” Marshall howls, seemingly incapable of fully escaping the anguish that had kicked off the album. For King Krule, there is no linear route towards peace. 

Man Alive! also captures a kind of cathartic transition period happening within Marshall’s personal life, where unexpected rays of light barely peek through desolate and despondent lullabies. No longer the nervous teen performing in an oversized suit on Letterman, Marshall is now a father, “Were you born in the air?” he asks in “Airport Antenatal Airplane,” later detailing in an interview how he first learned of his ensuing fatherhood onboard a plane, midway through recording the album. 

More of a impressionistic, sound collage than a fully fledged song, “Theme for the Cross” has become a standout track on the album for me. Drifting across its simple yet unearthly instrumentation are indecipherable whispers, the sounds of cars passing by, and haunting spoken word poetry in which Marshall refrains from his usual introspection and looks outward, commenting on industrialization, the brainwashing of the middleclass, and London’s apparent apathy towards refugees, “To men that drowned holding their daughters/ and weren’t allowed refuge from the horrors.”

“Underclass,” whose instrumentation feels like a call back to the smoke and jazz atmosphere of songs off of The Ooz. Beneath its dreamy synth and sax layers, Marshall’s lyrics seem to point to an aversion towards vulnerability. Marshall croons, “Kept my head up above your intimacy” until a well-placed saxophone solo burns through the fog, becoming a catalyst for his surrender, “I'm under your control/ Under the underclass/ Deep beneath it all.” 

Much like the album itself, Marshall is tidally locked into the ebb and flow conflict between all-consuming despair and the liberation of acceptance. 

The tail end of the album is the brightest Marshall has ever been, though you might have to wade through the grime and the gunk to bask in it. Intimately strummed vestiges from “Underclass” spill over and mutate into the haunting and unsettlingly peaceful “Energy Fleets.”  It's disorientating and orchestral; the oppressive dejection within its verse is enough to make one nauseous. Despite the immediate gloom, sour notes turn sweet as Marshall refrains, “Why stop reading when the page is about to turn/ Such a funny life I lead” over diaphanous chords that seem to float upward and forever. The tension that has been mounting resolves in the soaring and the crashing of slide guitars over swirling synth notes on the album’s closing track “Please Complete Thee,” leaving us with a steely implication of hope. 

“Hip-hop, jazz fusion, alternative rock, post-punk,” though technically not incorrect, this list of categorizations from Wikipedia struggles to describe Man Alive! Avoiding categorization is what King Krule does best. Each album confidently steps away from the sound palette of the last. Marshall borrows from as many genres as he has pseudonyms and brings together something new, something difficult to pinpoint, yet something distinctly King Krule. Man Alive! is  Eraserhead with a happier ending, where maturing means developing a new and sometimes uncomfortable sense of acceptance.