King Hannah are a band from Liverpool, but that’s not to say they’re a Liverpool band. The duo—comprising life-long local Craig Whittle and Welsh expat Hannah Merrick—feels less a product of the city’s storied rock’n’roll lineage than of its geographic significance: As a port city, Liverpool historically served as the waystation through which American roots music was imported into the UK and absorbed into the British bloodstream. King Hannah’s debut album, I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me, presents a group whose hearts belong to the American South, projecting their songs onto a desolate desert backdrop of broken-down blues and voodoo grooves. But their heads are very much stuck in their home lives, as they ponder the peculiarities and mundanities of existence with equal doses of weariness and absurdist humor.
King Hannah songs typically begin with an ominous rumble before gradually erupting into spark-shooting discord, following a similar path from the swamp to the scrapyard as Nick Cave and PJ Harvey before them, while coasting on a dirty-dub undercurrent that suggests a truckstop Portishead. But Merrick and Whittle are no southern-gothic cosplayers or film-noir fetishists. They may be embarking on a hellbound Route 66 road trip that many have traveled before, but their preferred topics of conversation include Steve Carell, go-karts, bedwetting, and fantasizing about your ex choking on dumplings.
As legend has it, Whittle first spotted Merrick singing in at an open-mic night and was instantly inspired to make music with her, but the two didn’t formally meet until two years later when, by pure happenstance, they found themselves employed at the same pub. You can understand why he was so taken with her: Merrick is a fascinating frontwoman who both embodies and upends the femme-fatale archetype. Her voice rarely rises above a smoke-ringed sigh even as the mix creeps into the red, her Welsh accent adding enigmatic inflections to the most common phrases. And that no-fucks-given nonchalance just makes her words feel that much more withering. On the prowling “Big Big Baby,” she dresses down an ex-lover with a single killer couplet: “I heard you got a lady pregnant/Well, I can only wish her well/Cuz soon you’ll have a bigger baby in the family than yourself.” But in that same dead-cool voice, she fesses up to her childhood enuresis—and the embarrassing nurse visits that resulted—on “All Being Fine,” suggesting that she’s, if not outright traumatized, then at least humbled by the memory.
For much of the record, Whittle gamely plays the silent partner, using his guitar like a weather vane that summons the inevitable storms. The seven-minute centerpiece “The Moods That I Get In” starts out as King Hannah’s “On the Beach” and ends up being their “Cortez the Killer,” as Whittle slowly piles on the feedback shards, serrated twang, and gut-wrenching solos. But in those rare moments when Whittle and Merrick do share the mic, we get charming glimpses of two misfits bonding over their eccentricities. The title track is a winsome stoner-country duet that recalls the quirky, self-effacing conversations between Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile on Lotta Sea Lice. And on “It’s Me and You, Kid,” they effectively turn their own origin story into a curtain-closing musical number: “I thank god the day we met in the gross bar/We’re doing it, so that we can live our whole lives just doing this,” Merrick reveals, before the song’s exultant chorus crashes in like an avalanche of confetti. It’s a rare moment of sing-along celebration from a duo that otherwise speaks in disquieting tones and deadpan one-liners, and it’s a deserved one: King Hannah’s music may initially conjure journeys down America’s lost highways, but they’re well on their way to building a world all their own.
