Kaki King - Legs to Make Us Longer
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CD Details
Artist: Kaki KingEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2004-10-05
Music Label: Red Int / Red Ink
Soundtracks:
- Frame
- Playing With Pink Noise
- Ingots
- Doing The Wrong Thing
- Solipsist
- Neanderthal
- Can The Gwot Save Us?
- Lies
- All The Landslides Birds Have Seen Since The Beginning Of The World
- Magazine
- My Insect Life
Music reviews of Legs to Make Us Longer
Music Review: Kaki King is the queen of acoustic guitar derivationism
Rating: 1 Stars
I have suffered through each of the Kaki King discs. I find her music intolerable. She was recomennded to me with such high praise, but both her titles are terrible disappointments. The praise turned out to be hype. These pieces are studies in guitar histrionics, utterly devoid of emotion. This music doesn't begin to rise to the high standards set by her predecessors and peers. She plays lots of notes, but it's a clattering, random cacophany; the techniques she uses look interesting, but only to those who haven't seen them employed by the myriad acoustic guitar visionaries who originated and developed them - most notably, guitar giant Michael Hedges, and the excellent Preston Reed. Unorthodox techniques may attract attention, but in themselves they signify nothing. Kaki King's music is trite, perfunctory, and mechanical. She is a fantastically unimportant guitarist.
For those who say, "do not compare Kaki's music to others," every clear-thinking person recognizes comparative evaluation as the bedrock of objective criticism. At least two Michael Hedges CDs represent the pinnacle of achievement in the acoustic instrumental guitar genre: "Aerial Boundaries," and "Oracle." Leo Kottke's riveting debut, "Six and Twelve String Guitar," is a credible contender as best solo acoustic guitar album ever recorded. Both Hedges and Kottke have elevated the world of acoustic guitar music with a most distinguished oeuvre, advancing technicality, yet exploding with originality and emotion. Their work is universally accepted and recognized as the standard by which everything else is to be judged.
The Sony Records / Kaki King publicity team shamelessly spews out the hype, but that's all it is. Hype. Kaki King is no original. She is no heir to Hedges. She has earned no musical inheritance. Hers is the sound of an immature, obnoxious, irrelevant derivationist - a petty musical shoplifter. Her music is piffle. It is disorderly and dissociative. It is not at all cohesive from a compositional perspective. It conveys no sense of emotional equilibrium or continuity: Ms. King often shifts gears dramatically within the same piece, but never for any discernable musical reason. Her so-called compositions are incomprehensible. There is nothing "modern," "post-modern," "pan-tonal," or "architectonic" about her structures. She is no composer. She is a hack. This is raw sound, compulsively slapped together with techniques appropriated from more advanced artists, with no understanding of how those techniques evolved (incredibly, she only recently discovered Leo Kottke and John Fahey), or more to the point, why those other artists felt compelled to develop and incorporate them. Ms. King's priorities are elsewhere; she actually stated in print that she believes she has given a good live performance when she has made a large number of audience members want to sleep with her. Many of her other comments are so offensive they cannot be reprinted here.
While Kaki King's music may lure neophytes unfamiliar with the genre, in no way is her work sui generis, nor does it exist in a vacuum. Michael Hedges may be gone physically but his recordings are widely available and selling smartly. There are literally dozens of other stellar acoustic artists, male and female, touring regularly, in the prime of their careers, releasing oustanding music. The world of instrumental acoustic guitar boasts a proud tradition of excellence, and is propulsed today by a new generation of exceptionally talented musicians. Ms. King's overhyped, smarmy, and disingenuous attempt to position herself among that rank is nothing more than a personally financed, shrewdly calculated, and boldly executed misinformation campaign designed to suppress the devastating truth: when all is said and done, her music simply fails to measure up.
Instrumental steel string solo acoustic guitar is a genre populated by a lineage of towering creative spirits, many of whom have set the bar extraordinarily high. The only reason Kaki King hasn't knocked it to the ground is because she has jumped under it.
Description of Legs to Make Us Longer
Japanese pressing of the new-folk act's sophomore album, includes one bonus track 'Nailes'. Epic. 2004.Kaki King fulfills the promise of her debut, Everybody Loves You, with an album that stretches a guitar sound already torn between the compass points. A frenetic player, King is a musical descendent of Michael Hedges, though she usually cites the underrated Preston Reed. Both guitarists employed two-handed tapping techniques to whiplash effect. So does King, although her phrasing is more abstract and her mind still moves faster than her hands at times. Signing up guitar mutant David Torn as producer, King is clearly intent at defying convention. Joined by a sparse rhythm at times, her sound is taking on a slight country edge. You can hear it on "Doing the Wrong Thing," with King playing electric guitar (or a processed acoustic) using her 10-fingered agility to create a rolling melodic counterpoint to the drummer's train rhythm. She rips it up on "Magazine," literally pummeling the fretboard with her fingers, ripping out a mad dervish. She also sings, with a Chet Baker-fragile voice; pleasant, but nothing that makes want to hear that instead of her guitar. --John Diliberto
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