Klein - marked (2024)

marked' is a time-shifted labyrinth of buzzsaw metal riffs and igneous shoegaze noise, unrestrained and utterly unhinged, it's Klein's inaugural concrète doom excursion - completely singular, of course, but if yr into Dreamcrusher, Botswana's Wrust, Darkthrone, Mica Levi, The Ephemeron Loop, or Geng’s chopped & screwed tribute to Black Sabbath, you’ll have some sense of what’s what. Once again leaning into that sharpened intuition, Klein upends expectations with a record of hard guitar shredding and knuckled drums that may come as a surprise to anyone who’s yet to catch her live show. We’ve listed a bunch of analogs in the opening paragraph, but, despite wracking our brains for comparisons, we’re at a loss for anyone else doing quite what she’s up to here. It’s transcendent, iconoclastic tackle, rupturing a whole new perspective on well worn tropes, in that way only she can. Motioning a nod to last year's 'Touched by an Angel' on the brief false-start ‘winner's clause', she quickly cuts thru whimsical jazz with grotesque mic interference and doom riffs that open the next chapter. Then, on ‘gully creepa', it's all laid bare: electrocuted drones get curdled with crushed hip-hop rolls, as her guitar stoops low enough to match that Sunn O)))/Earth octave, caked in distortion and re-heated by anthemic ATL strip club risers. She mangles radio shout-outs with fidgety power chords on 'afrobeat weekender', while on 'breaking news' she punctuates ghosted, pebble-dashed breaks with garbled vocals, and ‘season two' is like some lost Jandek session kissed with almost inaudible angelic vocalisations. Grasping the nettle, taking the bull by the horns - all that jazz - Klein depicts her most idealised and naturally radical self on this album, tiling up a mix of fractious short-form jolts and heavily satisfying chunks of charred guitar, with full blown sections of amp worship harnessed to spiny backbones, fearlessly staring down the abyss to express a bloodletting of outré energies. In some respects, it feels like a treatise on genre itself, cutting thru cultural stereotyping, the so called avant-garde, with all it’s archaic definitions.