Man Alive!

Man Alive! fleshes out Krule’s song crafting abilities to make for a slightly more cohesive and concise listening experience, albeit, one that remains perplexing—and still has a killer bite.

The final refrain of “please complete me” carries a powerful sense of hope – an end befitting an album that finds King Krule hitting a new stride.

Marshall duly stuffs his concise follow-up to The Ooz with the terror and negative liquid references, both literal and metaphorical, for which he is known.

A something-for-everyone record that doesn't sacrifice any of its alternative, underground edge in the process is something that very few artists of Marshall's mould could pull off. And yet, on Man Alive!, a record that gets better with each passing listen, he has been able to quite comfortable achieve this.

‘Man Alive!’ is an absorbing consolidation of Marshall’s inimitable sound.

Marshall sounds at peace here, and back to his best. [Apr 2020, p.110]

King Krule fans will find their hero to be far more accessible on ‘Man Alive!’. The Krulean gloom is beginning to lift and, with this newfound paternal responsibility and a more optimistic worldview in place, Marshall’s creativity is shining for all the world to see.

If previous King Krule efforts could be accused of sad-boy narcissism, Man Alive! shows that Marshall's gaze has never been entirely directed at his own navel. Despair is still there in his songwriting, but so is the capacity for change.

Man Alive!’s biggest strength lies in its sequencing. There’s no narrative throughline to the record, but there’s certainly still an emotional journey to it, elegantly flowing from optimistic synths to self-imploding percussion, from visions of his daughter’s life to the apocalyptic end of Marshall’s own. Like The Passion of Joan of Arc’s spiritual cinematography, each track plays like an extreme close-up in service of a uniquely coherent whole.

Holding to Marshall’s wavelength requires a little more investment than the dingy music asks for, but that’s not to say his shadowland of the heart lacks nuance.

There's something enveloping about his dense, churning compositions, like falling into a sonic cement mixer. [Mar 2020, p.99]

Marshall's lyricism remains beautifully inscrutable and passionate in equal measure. His go-to metaphors of sinking, floating, and dreaming are dispersed throughout tales of failed romance and urban malaise. After the album's first stretch of immediate standalone tracks, Man Alive! settles into a cinematic groove where the song arrangements are as nebulous as the lyrics and Marshall's toasty cigarette-burn vocals.

Divorced from Marshall’s self-set high standards, the record contains a compelling portrait of an artist caught mid-evolution, and its most intriguing moments are worth putting up with its less-successful experiments.

There is certainly less filler here than on previous albums, but there are still points which feel a little dull or repetitious.

Marshall is an artist who will work in any genre and his art digs into his psyche yet the end result can be just as messy as most psyches are. Man Alive! is far from a celebration, it sounds transitional casting a wide net unsurely searching and grasping for what is coming next.

For someone as forward-thinking and experimental, playful and funny as King Krule, Man Alive! is just too dull of a work to celebrate.

Lush as it sometimes is, too often disappears into an indecipherable cloud of smoke. [Apr 2020, p.30]

Ultimately, ‘Man Alive!’ feels like the work of an artist in transition: a handful of stunning tracks surrounded by some backfiring experiments. It’s frustrating but there are still gems to be found amid the soul-searching.

If Man Alive! treads a post-Ooz water, it's deep enough not to matter. [Apr 2020, p.95]