King Krule – ‘Space Heavy’ album review: a heady and hollow trip through time
After two years of recording and preparation, jazz punk indie rocker Archy Marshall, better known by his stage name King Krule, has dropped his fifth studio album, Spave Heavy. Written in the spaces between Marshall’s commute to and from London between his domestic life, Space Heavy is all about the in-betweens of life. With co-producer Dilip Harris, Marshall crafts a singular journey that is just as fascinated by the mundane downtimes and liminal spaces of life as anything “important” or “interesting” that might be happening.
Plastic straws on the album’s title track are worthy of impassioned screeches. The gaps that pop up in ‘Hamburgerphobia’ are almost as inscrutable as the title itself. With blaring saxophones and Marshall’s own ragged vocal delivery that typically stays at the bottom end of the baritone range (except for when he releases it in a full blast of screams), the zonked-out languidness of the music has just enough punch to keep things from getting too sleepy.
The entire album acts as one unbroken trip. At a certain point, common markers like song titles, song keys, and lyrics simply bleed into each other in a hazy blur. In a couple of cases, that blur is overt as songs segue directly into each other. Space Heavy never rushes its way into anything, stretching out into 15 songs that are only stopped and started by the necessities of traditional album tracklistings. As far as your imagination can go, that’s as far as King Krule are willing to take you.
It’s usually the slower and softer moments on Space Heavy that end up being the most fascinating. Marshall’s fascination with space as a concept means that the relatively straightforward moments like ‘From The Swamp’, ‘Tortoise of Independence’, ‘If Only It Was Warmth’ wind up being the highlights. The latter track sums up the general feeling of the album in two lines: “Walk two hours across empty space to fill the void / I’m so disappointed in you”.
There’s always something wrong going on, whether it’s eyes being popped out of sockets on album opener ‘Flimsier’, throwing dead people in the trash on ‘Empty Stomach Space Cadet’, or the dark, empty, and caged-off spaces in ‘Our Vacuum’. But, as Marshall lays bare in ‘Seaforth’, a little bit of faith is seemingly all that is needed to survive.
And yet, multiple listens of Space Heavy have left me feeling cold. I’ve struggled to get a full grasp on just what the hell Marshall is on about. The lack of hand-holding allows you to interpret the album in any way you see fit, but it comes at the expense of feeling incoherent and vague. King Krule are more than willing to sing the virtues of space, both positive and negative, but if you don’t fill that space with anything, then it just winds up being empty.
As each song begins to sound like the others around it, you have to applaud Marshall for creating a consistent atmosphere in which to get lost. But that’s exactly what happened to me every time I listened to Space Heavy: I got lost when I was trying to find a straight line.
That kind of openness will appeal to plenty of people who just want to put on a long piece of music and zone out while they do chores, blow smoke, and pick lint out of their belly buttons. For those who want to feel some kind of connection with the music they’re listening to, King Krule doesn’t meet you halfway. Space Heavy is a rabbit hole with no coherent logic and a ton of bizarre and fascinating vignettes strung together. Most of the time, that’s enough, but it keeps the album from ever being more than the sum of its disjointed parts.
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