Man Alive! is a grim prophecy of what the year had to come, one that feels like it should have been influenced by things that came after its February release date.
King Krule’s Man Alive! was the first album I fell in love with this year, and I wish it wasn’t.
What this year should’ve been was a victory lap. I was graduating school, finally getting my drivers’ license, traveling to Athens, GA to finally try and participate in its legendary music scene after living nearby for three years and never hitting it, starting out on a real career. Then everything happened, and the week I realized everything was starting to careen off track was a crushing time. The dawning realization of how many people would die, how little this administration would do about it, the amount everyone’s lives would change, how singularly the year would be defined by this event - all that shit weighed on us like a ton of bricks, dragged us down like lead in our pockets. I don’t have to remind you, because I know you remember.
What Man Alive! feels like is that week. You’ve had the rug pulled out from under you too many times, made too many realizations that nothing you can do will make things better, thought too hard about horrible things that could happen and the horrible things that already have. Archy Marshall has always been a paranoid artist, and it isn’t a stretch at all to say that 6 Feet Beneath the Moon and The Ooz, his first two records, were paranoid albums with defeatist inclinations. Songs ground and chugged, but on those records there was always the warmth of a “Border Line,” the caterwaul of a “Half Man Half Shark,” or the uptempo freakout of an “A Lizard State” ready to be deployed at any turn. Archy’s voice and attitude have always sounded like someone fed him a beehive, but on those records there was a sense that Archy was fighting back against the people and situations that were holding him down. In this one, it feels as if he has given up. The instrumentals wheeze and contort, Archy’s jazz chords break down and dissolve, songs don’t end so much as decay. Archy’s voice, capable of the kind of guttural howls and diseased groans we’ve heard him sputter so many times before, rarely rises above a shadowy croak here. None of these are bad things, and the album’s character oozes out of them like the slime Archy often sings about.
The album’s lyrics eerily foreshadow concepts that would become familiar to us very quickly as the pandemic took hold - the second single and opening track “Cellular” makes gestures at the way communication over a phone isn’t fulfilling to our emotional needs in the same way in-person contact is. “We’re losing signal, we’ve lost connection.” On “Alone, Omen 3,” he spins “Every minute, every second, you’re not alone” into a veiled threat, alluding to digital surveillance and the grim reality of constant exposure to people like the President on social media. “Supermarche” discusses the ways in which propaganda seeps into our daily conversations, and “Perfecto Miserable” is a haunting reminder of the ache of being isolated from our loved ones. Isolation is a familiar topic for Archy, of course, but when the track opens on an automated phone message, then goes on to “I guess I have to go,” as though he were hanging up, then, “and in my silence, it’s so menacing, and when I’m left alone, it’s so damaging,” it’s hard not to feel that he had some dark premonition of what was to come.
When he’s not making prophecy, his storytelling is as sharp as ever. “Stoned Again” is as close to a “Dum Surfer”-ish rager he gets here, shambling through a bad high and running through busy streets straight back to his mother’s house over a smoky beat and cavernous saxophones. In “Comet Face” he’s a werewolf, waking up next to freshly killed bodies in parks and making escapes, sounding harrowed and frantic. There’s a moment on that one where someone’s scream blends straight into a whirling sax solo, and it’s the highest energy point on the whole record, genuinely a little frightening. Another highlight is “Energy Fleets” on the comedown of the album, a dazed, deflating reflection on the “funny life” Archy leads, bleeding openly for people to hear on record. The song seems to shake the dirt off and get up at the end, the instrumentation swelling in a way that’s questioning and poignant.
The only true point of warmth on this deeply haunted album is “Underclass,” a jazzy, firelight song I can imagine dancing slowly with someone I care about to. Archy forgoes his growls on the back half of it, singing “Under the underclass, deep beneath it all, I had a feeling I was coming back, but little did I know,” with a clear head and a smooth, peaceful backing. It’s an ode to his girlfriend and the stabilizing effect she has on him, and with the knowledge that just prior to the release of Man Alive!, she and Archy welcomed their first child, this song becomes a bright point of hope. The album becomes a treatise on finding value in resignation. “We’ll kip in for the rain, and pass the time,” he says on “Alone, Omen 3.”
We’re not out of the woods yet. There’s months to go before a vaccine will be ready, and the state of the globe is still uncertain, chaotic, violent, messy, tragic, and a whole host of other shit things too while we’re at it. Things aren’t good right now, and no one can blame us for being depressed, isolated, or self-defeating. Archy’s son was born straight into that world, but in a few years’ time he won’t remember it at all, and he’ll see the warmth and love and bright future that the world, the real world, has to offer.
I have a feeling we’re coming back, little do we know.
FAVORITE TRACKS: “Cellular,” “Perfecto Miserable,” “Alone, Omen 3,” “Energy Fleets”
