Kaki King - Dreaming Of Revenge
[Cooking Vinyl]

For her fourth album, Kaki King returns to a mostly instrumental format, with her guitar-playing skill and dexterity as impressive as they’ve ever been on record. A dreamy combination of acoustic guitar wizardry, percussive fret taps and silky electronica is the order of the day with ‘Dreaming Of Revenge’, and although the album is not of a consistently top-drawer standard, the work deserves lavish praise nonetheless.

The album’s instrumental tracks often see the electric guitars tending to stand out not only for their quality, but also for their distinctive role as carriers of the song’s principal melody or refrain. They have a knack of emerging from beneath the lush folktronic soundscapes and practically doing the singing in the absence of a human voice. Although not particularly new, the approach is still impressive, as songs such as ‘Sad American’ and album-opener ‘Bone Chaos In The Castle’ do testify.

Even though King’s instrumental tracks can fade away from the listener’s attention a fair bit every now and then, the likes of ‘Open Mouth’ and ‘Air And Kilometers’ are right up there alongside the creations of artists in the vein of Lemon Jelly and 23 Skidoo, such is the allure of the multi-layered experimentation on offer.

Having said that, there are occasions where the process of vocalising the work does little to embellish the track in question. When she does add her vocals to the mix, you feel that the effect of the wonderful instrumentation can come across as somewhat neutered. An example of this can be found on ‘Life Being What It Is’, where her voice proves to be a distraction, on account of it being too childlike for the subject matter at hand, and annoying rather than charming. It’s not something which occurs continuously as the record carries on, but such an instance does stick in the mind, perhaps as a result of the sheer quality surrounding it.

This release sees Kaki King draw inspiration from the various sonic spheres with which she has toyed over the years, and while the new material here may not represent such a considerable inter-album departure compared to the progress witnessed in the period between her first two LPs and 2006’s ‘...Until We Felt Red’, there are still enough moments of excellence here to lend weight to her already-worthy reputation.

Dreaming Of Revenge Tracklisting:

1. Bone Chaos In The Castle
2. Life Being What It Is
3. Sad American
4. Pull Me Out Alive
5. Montreal
6. Open Mouth
7. So Much For So Little
8. Saving Days In A Frozen Land
9. Air And Kilometers
10. Can Anyone Who Has Heard This Music Really Be A Bad Person?
11. 2 O’Clock