"It appears unavoidable..." is how Kaki King starts album-opener "Yellowcake". And she's right-- it's totally unavoidable. The guitar's way lower in the mix, and King has a singing voice that's...nice. The trouble is, that's about all it is. Even multitracked to high heaven, ...Until We Felt Red's conspicuous new breathy vocals hit like a half-pound handful of goose down-- a significant change from how King used to nimbly pummel percussive delicacies from her collection of guitars.
On previous album Legs to Make Us Longer King dabbled at the palettes of guitar colorists from Michael Hedges to Jim O'Rourke and highlighed her strengths (ornate fingerpicking, sedate slide electric, insistent slaps at six strings and body alike). But ...Until We Felt Red's suggestive title hints that King's facing down some perverse embarrassment over the assets that brought her to our attention in the first place. Her nascent wordiness, limp experimentalism, evident avoidance of high-wire guitar kung-fu, and this record's violent troughs and scant peaks make it a "new direction for Kaki King" and a fairly serious disappointment.
Originality remains a weak suit for King. That she's always borrowed heavily from 1990s Chicago post-rock explains Tortoise appendage John McEntire's involvement (as producer and performer) here. "You Don't Have to Be Afraid" is a gorgeous-if-familiar cache of Gastr del Solian compositionettes quilted together by a single quilt-worthy lyric ("You don't have to be afraid of the pain inside you"). Sadly, that doesn't stop her from cooing the sentiment for eight long minutes. On "Goby", featherweight cymbals and a loping bass carry Kaki's electric guitar ever closer to Tortoise's TNT territory.
"First Brain" pits flighty acoustic against faraway trumpet but nobody wins. Stabbing at smoky jazz club croon is "I Never Said I Love You", with King's lithe arpeggio runs and bouts of manic, distorted chords fighting a big McEntire drum kit and her untight grasp on vocal pitch. Sans lyrics, "Soft Shoulder" wins by doing well what Davids Grubbs and Pajo have done before: put five or six picturesque guitar tracks over post-rock drums and an egg shaker. Call it "undislikable." And "Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers", the album's softronica cooldown, should've been on somebody else's record entirely.
It's strange, though, about this new Kaki King. Occasionally, her inelaborate poetry says everything all at once. Here's "Second Brain" in its entirety: "Ten years, 2000 stomach aches/ If I get one every other day/ Are we to have another century of guitar/ When the best instrument in the world is still the piano?" This is whispered atop a lush bed of thumb piano and the acoustic antique King's straining to outgrow. Here among the album's strongest moments, King's attempt to musically move along is just another opinion about why we cling so to the classics. And she's right again.
