KING KRULE — ‘THE OOZ’ (TRUE PANTHER / XL)
Wunderkind Archy Marshall is an unlikely star, if one of his generation’s brightest: A lanky, freckled 23-year-old with a fiery red mane seizes the microphone like a man possessed. Unassuming but arresting all the same, he cranks out a howling, edgy magnetism of his hero, Elvis, and encyclopedic music combing of production giant J. Dilla that he’s refined since his junior high start as Zoo Kid in his native London, winning fans in Beyonce and Frank Ocean along the way.
“THE OOZ” — Marshall’s second studio LP as King Krule — builds on all the promise of “6 Feet Beneath the Moon” and is the latest bright spot in a career seemingly destined for a “Pet Sounds”-level opus, one of a handful of true indie rock innovators grinding today. The sprawling outing delights in highs and lows, drifting in darkly snarled trip-hop grooves (neon-lit jazz haunt opener “Biscuit Town”) punctuated by manic post-punk spasms (the frenetically
percussive “Emergency Blimp”). The album drips like a faucet with vocals spanning between torturous hollers, inflamed spoken word and hazy emcee diatribes over a full hour of 19 tracks, a meandering intergalactic journey that’s as enlightening as it is indulgent.
A less capable conductor would have had “THE OOZ” fumbling through genres like a high school jazz band gone goth, but in equal parts anthropologist and alchemist, King Krule manages nothing short of miraculous in a fusion of disparate offshoots of styles that plays groundbreaking, not insularly referential. It’s through that filter that the ghoulishly captivating “Dum Surfer” — a master class in garage rock elevated by perfectly placed horns and crescendos — and the chilled subterranean Thom Yorke-march of “Czech One” feel of the same world, an exciting one to inhabit with the promise of even more marvels the further Marshall slashes into the underbrush.