Abandoned To The Voice In My Head: King Krule’s Man Alive!

on XL Recordings/Matador Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Archy Ivan Marshall is a 25-year-old musician who performs under the nom de guerre King Krule. As Krule, he has delivered a stunning portrait of demonic exorcism across three full length releases and as many extended plays. As Archy Marshall, he’s added a book and another album, both featuring his brother, Jack.

In a universe devoid of the weary and multitudinous musical classification system, people would immediately recognize the emotional content of the Krule/Marshall output and stamp it as such. Within the varied categorization that has been embraced by those seeking to brand themselves with the musical ideologies of others as a lifestyle choice, defining King Krule as Emo is still a contextual misstep. His is the sound of an ambling internal, but revolutionary discord.And, it might not solely be about the music. His words, strung together across all of his releases, establish a rhapsodic manifesto that marks the passage from dysfunction to success without aiding the marketing hijinks of outsized music companies obsessively monetizing and formally (habitually, even) structuring the music they issue. Marshall is as lyrically poetic and incising as Public Enemy or Bruce Springsteen, but where those musicians stood solidly on the mantle of genre, Archy Marshall’s abandonment of classification rests within his core. In this era of traveling lethal viruses and internet hacked elections, that one singular…