Sea Liner MK 1 is unrelenting, a glum and menacing affair, the picture of a night’s out darker closing turns heaving in an alleyway, waiting wobbly-legged for a cab, dreading the head terrors of morning.
Every song unwraps like an ephedrine capsule cracking.įor how sepia-toned the music sounds, there are moments when it becomes unsettling and frigid and tense. Though it proceeds at a leisurely pace, its off-kilter sway needles at the eardrums, prickling the knees and lulling the brain. But the album’s warped patterning is no crutch. Swell is one of the only tracks on Drown with a steadfast rhythm, and it benefits greatly from it, riding one uninterrupted wavelength, smooth and assured. Each note on the record seems unhurried and jittery at once, snarling together into the sort of anodyne tracks H-heads can rock to. Scattershot art-drums shuffle and jerk around in odd patterns, and ragged synths slide in and out uninvited. In contrast to 6 Feet’s string tack, Place 2 Drown’s musical direction cuts closer to Marshall’s initial passion – a twist of the kind of sullen, dreamy instrumentals Rawkus Records alumni Black Star and Company Flow favoured in their heyday, and twitchy, stifling dub. Whatever Marshall was trying to accomplish with the nominal switch-up, he gets there much more empirically with Place 2 Drown, a stellar, languid collection of hip-hop, doused in the moody smog of London streets.
So it went with King Krule who used his actual name of Archy Marshall to put out his sophomore full-length A New Place 2 Drown, the follow-up to 2013’s 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, a spare collection of spiny guitar tracks, Krule half-rapping, half-singing over it. A listener can’t help but wonder if the new project carries more personal attachment, or if a drastic change in style warranted a new name on the album jacket, or whether the musician felt too old to trade in pseudonyms. It’s all too easy to make pre-emptive existential assumptions when a musician ditches a moniker and records an album under his birth-name.
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