Album Review: King Krule - 6 Feet Beneath The Moon

Jake Bugg ruined the blanket statement: no other 19-year-old in contemporary music could summon the pathos of Archy Marshall, King Krule.

Krule's debut album 6 Feet Beneath The Moon is angry and simple, but too long, and overwrought (great art being not what is put in so much as what is taken out, etc.). Track one Easy Easy is recognisable as a previously released single – it's a wonderful track. Marshall's vocals come apart again and again like a pre-schooler's shoelace. He sounds as if he's cooking the lyrics up as he goes along; a rare and precocious talent in a musician. His work is his voice, hoarse and sonorous. “I need the warmth of your mother to hold me down/Hold me down/Girl, let me lay here,” Marshall howls oedipally in The Krokodile. A very young man boiling himself alive with self-loathing right there. 

There are standouts in 6 Feet... – pools of gloom, ironically, hiding from proverbial streetlamp light. The record is too well-produced. Gone is Zoo Kid's grit, 6 Feet... has a ska track on it – A Lizard State – in which Krule abandons his gloom entirely. There's a second incarnation of Has This Hit? on the record, supplanting the lo-fi halo of its first incarnation with a question mark (literally) and the magnesium-flare of top dollar production values. Still, Marshall is a brilliant lyricist, largely because he sings every word like he is blaming the listener (and the critic) for his having written it.