Search - Kaki King :: Junior

Philip R. from CASA GRANDE, AZ
Reviewed on 4/15/2011...

I'm a big fan of Kaki, but I was disappointed with this album. There are some good songs here, and it's a much better album than Dreaming of Revenge. But I prefer the darker introspection of her first three albums.

Yet another new direction for Kaki...

bkhage01 | 04/15/2010

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Now don't get me wrong - this isn't a bad album. But I would probably give it 2 1/2 - 3 stars because it's not great. Simply put: it's not Kaki. Or rather, it's not Kaki's old sound. Long gone is the sound she perfected on her first couple albums. This one is even more pop-py and peppy than "Dreaming of Revenge," which I found to be a let-down. I wasn't a huge fan of her "Mexican Teenagers" EP either, so I guess I should have known what to expect from this album, since that appears to be the direction she's chosen.



I was a bit thrown off by the parental advisory sticker on the front of the album - that's not really typical for her music. After listening to the cd, I'm not really sure it deserved the PA warning, but there is certainly some explicit content. It's not so much curse words as it is the general meaning behind songs like "Spit It Back In My Mouth" (yep - it means what you think it means) and "My Nerves That Committed Suicide" (possibly the best song on the album). I was a bit disappointed to hear "Spit It Back In My Mouth" - that's something you would expect to hear on an Amy Winehouse, Katy Perry, etc. pop album. The final song on the album, "Sunnyside," also has the f-bomb a couple times. Otherwise, the album is fairly clean.



The interesting part is that Kaki's lyrics haven't really progressed much since she dropped the instrumental theme to her albums. While the music is pretty well-written (her guitar skills have definitely progressed over time), something just doesn't sound right. I can get over the fact that she's not going to be sticking to the slap-guitar techniques and instrumental songs that won her recognition in the beginning. But throwing a generic-sounding rock band behind mediocre (at best) lyrics isn't what fans have come to expect from Kaki.



Some songs are still excellent. The instrumental highlights (and only 3 instrumental tracks on the album) are: "Everything Has An End, Even Sadness," "My Nerves That Committed Suicide," and "Sloan Shore." Other than these three, only "Hallucinations From My Poisonous German Streets" and "Sunnyside" caught my ear. Oddly enough, "Sunnyside" is the most simplistic song on the album - all acoustic guitar + piano - but it's the only one with where Kaki sings words that you actually believe. The torment in her voice is palpable, and for once, actually fits the instrumentation.



Perhaps we will see her progress on future albums, but unfortunately, half of the songs on this album are completely skippable, with most of the album's highlights being the instrumental tunes."

Devolutionary

Clifford G. Wayne | 07/10/2010

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Like going back to 90s euro rock. This disk has the feeling of a transitional piece, a sorting-out phase for the artist while she tries to find a new creative voice. The artistic risk in changing voices is the loss of artistic integrity. As a transitional work in itself, a window into the artist's struggle to evolve by rejecting what was for something different, I'm not sure it was worth my time to listen. At a certain point one has to stop focusing on the artist's influences and expect something authentic and original. If one is an artist, the creative bit is creating original art - not reflections. So this was a disappointing work in that, for me, it was 90s material, different but not new. Different is not always better even if better is always different."