Recap Kaki King at Stoughton Opera House

The Stoughton Opera House's old-timey wooden seats, blue proscenium flecked with gold fleur-de-lis symbols, and show-program notes (mostly drawn from a Wikipedia entry) all set a tone of politeness and dignity Saturday night, but it was lost on self-diagnosed "schizophrenic" Kaki King. As she playfully fended off song requests during the second set of a solo-acoustic show, she casually snapped, "No! Fuck you people! Wait, did I just say that in front of a paying audience?" Not that anyone would've really been offended by then. King's extraordinary playing and composition had already engulfed the crowd, putting everyone on a friendly-fuck-you basis with intricate finger-tapped melodies, esoteric tunings, and guitar-body percussion.

The greatest pleasure of the show was hearing songs from 2006's ...Until We Felt Red and 2008's Dreaming Of Revenge without the band that backed King on those albums. All night, she switched between two acoustic guitars without using any effects—not even a loop pedal. King began with the Red instrumental track "Goby," an effortless weave of strange chords, glittering harmonics, and the percussive "clop" of her fingers against the strings. At another high point of the mostly instrumental set, "Brazilian," King built up a bossa-nova rhythm and spiraled over it with lines that at times rivaled the fluidity of a great jazz sax solo. The tune ended with the kind of fret-scrambled chromatic freakout that usually only makes sense on a feedback-laden electric guitar. King never got lost in the welcoming trippiness of the songs, always ready to pull the comfort out from under herself with an abrupt change of volume (again, using just the delicate control of her fingers) or sneak up on a steady throb of a bass notes pattern with the flicker of a new melody.

Between songs, King usually re-tuned her guitars into mysterious new configurations and rambled about the new album she's working on ("crazy stuff that has nothing to do with this"); her worries about Morrissey's onstage collapse at a UK show Saturday night ("He's supposed to be my baby daddy"); and the local crowd. ("I don't know what to make of you Midwestern eccentrics. It's this Garrison Keillor syndrome.") At one point after the intermission, King left the stage to go put on a fedora. In Morrissey's honor, King covered The Smiths' "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want," tenderly crooning "See, the life I've had could make a good man bad..." She also treated the crowd to some in-the-works new songs that sounded like her most straightforward yet, including a rather suspenseful rocker that she says will eventually have lyrics about two spies who are both double agents, one of whom has to expose the other. (Did we mention King rambled a lot?)

The show closed with "Jessica." Stripped of the recorded version's swaying drums and electric guitar, it reminded The A.V. Club of the lyrical power lurking within this instrumentalist. The song trailed off uncertainly with the line, "When the milk tasted like perfume, you had been drinking from the carton and I knew." It's hard to know what exactly to make of this intimate detail, but the more eccentric King got, the easier it was to get drawn in.