Archy Marshall appears as though out of nowhere, stepping out of the violet-lit murk to the microphone – a flash of white electric guitar, pale features, red hair and a glimpse of white socks. Released last month, his arresting second album under the name King Krule is titled The Ooz, thanks to its debt to bodily gunk and entropy.
The subdued lighting – also available in sickly green, deep-sea blue and suffocating red – fits. For one track, around the time of (A Slide In) New Drugs, the six-strong band play in near-darkness. The set is divided between King Krule’s more meandering, impressionistic songs – like The Ooz’s Lonely Blue, full of startling, downbeat beauty – and moshpit detonations, such as the lurching, zombie-punk of this album’s most commercial single, Dum Surfer.
“I’m mashed! You’re mashed! He’s mashed!” runs the bit of that song that most resembles a chorus, pointing up the default wastedness of a lot of King Krule’s output and, tangentially, the Monster Mash. It’s safe to say that no one else is making music quite like this (save for Marshall’s friends, like Jamie Isaac, who tends even more towards jazz).
Somehow, this south Londoner – a troubled truant who finally found a home at the Brit School – has gone from being a true cult original to a certain level of US fame, his work being praised on Beyoncé’s Beyhive blog (although he doubts it was actually her). Typically, because Marshall is a savvy loner, he turned down the chance to work with Kanye West. Also typically – for Marshall’s meta-narrative is full of despair and frustration – the writing sessions he did do with Frank Ocean came to nothing.
As his King Krule debut, 2013’s Six Feet Beneath the Moon, attested, a certain sludginess has long been Marshall’s metier, and unlikely as it seems, it’s connecting hard with an audience who nod along to songs like the wired 90s indie-rock bent of Emergency Blimp – from The Ooz, about insomnia – as though it were UK garage or hip-hop. His recent US and current European tours sold out swiftly.
Marshall’s dense soup of unlikely influences – jazz, dub, rockabilly, post-punk, the Specials, even bossa nova – comes refracted tonight through a haze of virtual smoke and is delivered with a guttural London growl that can’t help but recall Joe Strummer. Marshall’s words, though, are often structured with a rapper’s flow, with internal assonances and self-referentiality to the fore. “Ooz” is also “Zoo” backwards; Zoo Kid was Marshall’s first moniker, when the precocious creative first put his tracks up on Bandcamp in 2010.
At 23, he has now lost some of the visual shock that greeted his earliest songs. In the videos for Out Getting Ribs or his unofficial generational anthem, Easy Easy, Marshall, then 16, looked like a 12-year-old urchin wearing his grandfather’s drapes, and sounded like he gargled tar. Tonight, these remain the songs this sold-out crowd bawl back to him with the most abandon.
That child has become a man – a little threatening, where before his raw-throated fury was undercut by his elfin appearance. But the disconnect between Marshall’s scurvyish looks and the gaping heartache that come out of him remains one of the pleasures of King Krule. “My head’s in all kinds of a mess/ She takes it upon herself/ Concaves her chest,” runs the wracked Lonely Blue.
To the uninitiated, a lot of tonight’s set might sound ill thought-out or unfinished; even as a fan of his disjointedness, you do wish Marshall would tighten up and focus. When he sits at a keyboard and croons, you can sense the potential for James Blake-style crossover appeal. But the sudden digressions make perfect jazz sense, and the presence of Ignacio Salvadores on sax is a revelation on songs such as The Ooz itself, which ends in an intense solo. Moreover, the contemplative passages provide respite from the unrelenting intensity of King Krule’s feelings.
If you were here for a laugh, though, you could do worse than lose all your untethered possessions to Half Man Half Shark – a carnivalesque Ooz track that recalls Tom Waits and causes a tidal surge live. It climaxes in a belligerent chant of “And if you don’t know/ And if you don’t care/ Don’t try to hide it!” and of course another carnivorous sax meltdown.
