Since it's been such a consistent source of great experimental and drone music over the years, people tend to forget that Kranky is, to a lesser degree, also a pop label. The Chicago imprint was, of course, home to Low for a stretch and in recent years has developed a wider stable of song-friendly artists like Deerhunter and Lotus Plaza. To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie, the Minneapolis-based two-piece of singer Jehna Wilhelm and multi-instrumentalist Mark McGee, aren't easy to place along this continuum since they operate with one foot in the avant-garde and the other in the structural and, like Low or Deerhunter, tend to draw from both schools.
We last heard from the band in 2007 when it debuted with The Patron, a heady concept piece based loosely around the dangers of unchecked capitalism (more prescient now in the wake of that, uh, global economic crisis), but writers and listeners seemed to give too much weight to the record's content instead of its lush sonics. The real appeal of The Patron was the captivating interplay between the group's two members, the way McGee laid a foundation of interwoven post-rock textures over which Wilhelm could paint her ghostly vocals. With new LP Marlone, the group has smartly jettisoned the storyboard conceptualism of its previous work for a deeper exploration of this sound, and the album is more assured and focused as a result.
The style To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie pursue on the record isn't new-- you could lump them in with contemporaries Sian Alice Group, Asobi Seksu, even Palms, and there's certainly a Portishead inspiration at play-- but it's what the band does with its shoegaze and post-rock atmospheres that ultimately sets it apart. Part of it is pacing (the sequencing of the record is superb) and part of it is the delicate balance between the contrasting notions of dark and light, heavy and airy, and gloomy and hopeful. Marlone's individual songs play with these opposites: opener "You've Gone Too Far" explores ambient tones with wide-open spaces, expanding and contracting over its nine minutes before the punchier "The Needle" sweeps in and pushes things in a more forceful direction.
Sometimes they achieve both in the same song. Album centerpiece "I Will Hang My Cape in Your Closet" (bonus points for the super goth title) takes form over a long, scraping instrumental section before Wilhelm introduces a climax of upbeat vocal chants. Most impressive is that they pull off such moments largely without the use of hooks or traditional song structures and, still, the record doesn't wander off course. Instead, TKAPB keep attention with shifts in tone and momentum that seem to appear at just the right time. The most surprising is "In People's Homes", a buoyant two-minute pop cut that springs up virtually out of nowhere to loosen the seriousness of Marlone's second half, which the band then follows up with the industrial dirge "Turriptosis". Such balance is no mean feat and is just one of several pleasant surprises the album has to offer.
