King Krule – real name: Archie Marshall – will be all of 19 on Saturday. Uncoincidentally, he's putting out his debut album on the same day, a day of the week when no one else releases albums, roughly a year after everyone expected him to. 6 Feet Beneath the Moon is that sort of a record too – awkward, bloody-minded, tuned into its own scales, but hopeful. It might be good juju. Football players often score goals on their birthdays.
Marshall still looks like an urchin, too young to buy the cigarettes he's always sucking on. His voice, bigger than his body, is further magnified by reverb. His singing on this remarkable debut – a cross between slurring, chewing and hawking up phlegm – often borrows its internal rhymes from hip-hop as much as it recalls his most obvious vocal forebear, Joe Strummer. Styles, genres and eras collide in King Krule. A Lizard State, for instance, begins with a groaning snarl and unfurls into what you can only call jazz-rap.
Despite a 21st-century south London upbringing, the bequiffed Marshall sometimes wears natty 50s throwback attire in videos, reinforcing the idea of an old soul in tight skin, one who started getting noticed three years ago as Zoo Kid. Unlike other youthful retro contemporaries such as Jake Bugg, though, Marshall knows a hell of a lot about jazz and dub.
Reading over the reams of excited interviews with this one-to-watch that ran as long ago as 2011, Marshall seems to be one of those infuriatingly self-possessed types who went straight from the breast to New York No Wave. Accordingly, his debut is a sprawling, dour coming-of-age almost-soul set, not unlike fellow Londoner and XL signee Adele's 19, but more in the vein of The The if he were produced by King Tubby. "Another disappointed soul," roars Marshall at the start of Has This Hit?, "Well, I tried to keep it in control…"
Like Adele, Marshall went to the Brit School, but it's not something you could hold against him because he probably knows a little too much about esoteric soundscaping for his own good. This strange and beguiling album is more about texture and space than traditional songcraft. Track one, Easy Easy, is about as Top 40 as it gets. There's a chorus to hang on to. Much else here sounds spectacularly cavernous, reverbed within an inch of its life, while Marshall's voice is right in your ear, intimately threatening.
On Border Line his guitar is almost as counterintuitive as Johnny Marr's was in the early days of the Smiths, trebly and a little ska where everything else is menacing or spaced out. Out Getting Ribs, an early, lovelorn Zoo Kid track, is here, sounding just as exceptional as it did in 2010.
The longer you listen, the more these disparate influences and structured elements coalesce into a very cogent record. The extraordinary Cementality – a kind of beatless reverie – finds solace, of sorts, in urban concrete.It helps to stop expecting songs from King Krule, and instead lay yourself open to his drawling, sprawling atmospheres and just let the tunes blindside you when they come. The Krockadile sounds mightier with every play, even though the vocals, guitar, beats and water droplets initially sound as though they've been parachuted in from four different songs from four different genres. "This is no vice," Marshall yawps. And, really, it isn't.
