The 19-year-old Londoner Archy Marshall has the pale, fine-boned features of Ron Weasley and the rough shout of someone sent to crush your kneecaps. Unsteady, urgent, and skirting tonelessness, it leaks out of him in hair-raising bursts, a poorly kept secret in his birdlike body, and it heightens the emotional stakes of his music before you've internalized a word he's sung. On his earliest recordings, first under the name Zoo Kid and then King Krule, he assembled a haunting, singular sound out of nothing but that voice, accompanied by some hard-strummed jazz chords on a broken-sounding electric guitar, some quiet, sputtering drum loops, and a blank wall of reverb. He sounded profoundly alone, but it was a jagged sort of aloneness, full of raw, exposed nerves and devoid of the comfort that solitude brings. "My heart got hold of my head and ripped it to its seams," he sang on "Bleak Bake", a representative sentiment.
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. 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. But otherwise, this is the same chipped-brick urban landscape that Marshall prowled through on his EP. The music's surface swarms quietly with breaks, but nothing sounds busy or crowded, the way collage or pastiche-based music often does. 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."
Marshall's voice is pushed further to the forefront, and he explores its gnarliest crags and catches. 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. Also like Brock, he sounds warily intelligent, and though he projects a surly air, his songs are tender at the root. The lovely, drunken ballad "Baby Blue" turns on velvet, indigo guitar chords and a gently swooning vocal melody. 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.
His lyrics occasionally play with clichés, and the way they emerge mangled from his vocal chords. "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". The lyrics read terribly, but even these "Hang in There" clichés are intriguingly dented by the sound of his voice. 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".
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.
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. Over the course of 6 Feet's 52 minutes, the sound loses some of its essential mystery. 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.
