Kaki King at the High Noon Saloon
While the A.V. Club can appreciate that Kaki King’s set at the High Noon Saloon on Friday was well-varied, her somewhat pedestrian vocal delivery stuck out like an extra elbow next to her third eye-like virtuoso guitar work. The jarring difference between King’s blurry-handed, finger-tapping wizardry and her newer, watered-down pop sound came early when the classic “Bone Chaos In The Castle” was sandwiched between the odd-time bounciness (and slight R.E.M. flavor) of “Falling Day” and the morose, minor-key folk of “Life Being What It Is.” After all, “Bone Chaos In The Castle” is a tune that really shows how King’s hands labor over her guitar—tapping out melodies, hammering bass chords, and even hitting the body of the guitar for extra rhythmic clatter—doing things with two hands that Shiva couldn’t do with four.
Many of the pop tunes from this year’s Junior found King scaling back her technique to better suit the songs, but dynamic drummer Jordan Perlson and multi-instrumentalist Dan Brantigan really stepped up to color them in. Brantigan spent most of his time onstage holding an EVI, a wind-activated synthesizer made for trumpet players. The EVI would rumble in and out the growling basslines, soaring ambience, and infectious leads during tunes like “Falling Day,” “Death Head,” and “Montreal.” However, on post-rock meanderings like “Everything Has An End, Even Sadness,” Brantigan would play synth bass with one hand, while manning a trumpet with the other. The set pulled plenty of numbers from Junior, but stretched well across the various sonic phases of King’s discography.
“Would I be weird to call the two girls I had sex with last night to ask them why my arms hurt so badly?” King joked to plenty of laughs. The Brooklyn guitar whiz took no issue with kidding around about her sexuality, picking on her bandmates, or discussing her Twitter account with the modest attendance throughout the evening, before finally jumping into the crowd to dance after set-closer “Gay Sons Of Lesbian Mothers”—a mighty exercise in loop-building with a slide guitar. “I hope you’re ready to dance,” King shouted to the crowd, before building up a massive dance-pop tune and jumping to the floor.
