 | Kaki King |
With Junior, Kaki King has a good showcase for her songwriting and guitar playing chops with a slew of songs featuring intricate vocals and lyrics coupled with some good guitar showpieces as well. While her style may come off as a bit melodramatic and heavy-handed, she still exhibits her strong talents throughout the record and she clearly has a lot to give to it.
The songs are somewhat in the singer-songwriter vein, but done with some more pacing and uptempo style than most of those. These are not meandering folk songs, but are more high paced rock style songs. The songs can be quick and angry (“The Betrayer”, “Death Head”), winding rock songs (“Spit It Back In My Mouth”) or even more subdued rock/folk songs (“The Hoopers of Hudspeth”, “Sloan Shore”). She borrows from many different genres and styles of music, with more modern song construction juxtaposed with some elements from past eras such as classic rock and psychedelia.
She displays her song writing and guitar talents on the record, and it is because of these that she can play songs in so many different styles and make them all work reasonably well. The drawbacks of the album is that it is very heavy-handed in its style and delivery and there is not much of a sense of levity in it. Her emotions play strongly through the record, and that could be off putting in some ways as there are some very serious songs and subject matters played out in a very dramatic way on the album. Additionally, the genre jumping and disparate song stylings can be a little distracting at time and the flow of the album is not the most natural.
This is a well done album by Kaki here. In some ways the strong dramatic flavor of the album and the genre jumping keep it from being a really great album for me, but it is still very strong in a lot of ways and Kaki showcases some great talent here. It is a good release by her and she is one of the stronger solo women acts going out there today.
Kaki King – Spit It Back In My Mouth – From Junior (Amazon | iTunes)
Kaki King – Death Head – From Junior (Amazon | iTunes)
