There was a time when you might have confused Krill with a band who cared more about actual shit than giving one. "Turd", from a 2014 EP released by the grunge-pop Boston slackers, found frontman Jonah Furman imagining himself as the titular piece of fecal matter. "If I could just be ate/ At least someone might say I was worthy," he sings, resigned to a life as an undigested peanut.
So yeah, Krill are a little juvenile and a lot insecure—the title of that EP, Steve Hears Pile in Malden and Bursts into Tears, refers to Krill’s admiration for (and low-key jealousy of) fellow Bostonians and Exploding in Sound label-mates Pile. On Lucky Leaves, Krill’s borderline-paranoid 2013 album, Furman defended the right to feel like a failure. But in the year that followed the release of Steve, something changed. "I was thinking about how Lucky Leaves had all of this sad shit, and I believed in it and totally agree with it, but I wanted to see where you could go after that," Furman told Rolling Stone last month. The result is the band’s best album to date, the bigger, brighter and bolder A Distant Fist Unclenching, which locates a weird confidence in the universality of our individual anxieties.
Pile-worship aside, Fist finds more evident kinship with another band just a few hundred miles north: Montreal's Ought, whose More Than Any Other Day was one of last year’s finest indie rock releases. Both Furman and Ought’s Tim Beeler deal in open-ended questions and nervous tics, suggesting worried young men striving for uncommon lives. Though Fist has more passion than anything Krill have done, Furman is still a dyspeptic figure, asking God to grant him strength to deal with his "brain problem."
But for all of Furman’s neuroses, there’s a purgative quality to Fist that feels almost joyful. It helps that the band has become powerful enough to lift Furman out of his own head for a little while, boosted also by cleaner production and more distinctive guitar work. Their secret weapon remains drummer Ian Becker, whose dynamics and off-kilter rhythms keep everyone on their toes. Once content with mere tantrums, Krill are now flirting with an almost anthemic sound, with songs like "Squirrels" and "Brain Problem" climaxing in ways big enough to inspire listeners to keep their fists not only clenched, but aloft.
Fist will present a few sticking points for some listeners, the most notable being Furman’s voice. Like an unfortunate cross between Eef Barzelay and Jeremy Freedman (plus a little Bobcat Goldthwait for when he gets really riled up), it scans anywhere from vaguely comical in its jittery frogginess to weirdly precious. And while he's deft with odds turn of phrase, Furman is often too reliant on metaphors either too simple ("It Ends") or too open-ended to connect. But when they get it right, like on the stuttering S&M allegory "Torturer", everything clicks into place.
Above all else, A Distant Fist Unclenching is an album about embracing clarity in the face of constant, nagging doubt ("To be given one shot, and to know I could blow it," Furman wails on "Squirrels"). On seven-minute centerpiece "Tiger", the titular unclenched fist appears "in the distance," but "in the nearness," Furman sings, "there is a bad day ending." Though Krill aren’t quite ready to let go of the anxieties that inspired them to write their eccentricities in excrement in the first place, Fist suggests that there is light at the end of the sewer drain.
