First of all, if you don’t know who Kaki King is, HA HA! Second, you’re about to know who she is, because her most recent album, Dreaming of Revenge, is pretty much a masterpiece. It was released in March of this year and somehow, regrettably, it slipped under my radar until now. Kaki King has been getting lots of publicity recently; she had a few songs on the Into The Wild soundtrack, she wrote some music for August Rush as well as serving as a hand-double for the guitar playing scenes, and she was even in a duet with Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters for a song on their newest album. She’s come a long way from when I saw her in an edition of Rolling Stone Magazine a few years ago, featuring her as an up-and-coming “Guitar God”.

Her playing style is unique, to say the least. I’m sure you’ve seen a few of those guys on TV or wherever, those people that play “slap guitar”, if you will; they pluck and pop the strings and create rhythms by slapping and tapping their guitar while playing to create some sort of tribal, primitive, melodic music that astounds everybody in the room because they’ve never heard anything like it. Kaki King is that times ten. Her music started out completely instrumental, just her and a guitar making crazy sounds. Since then, however, it’s grown and evolved into something bigger, more encompassing. On her third album, …Until We Felt Red, she finally introduced the world to her singing voice, which had been unnecessarily neglected on her first two albums, because it’s as lovely as the music she creates. On Dreaming of Revenge, she utilizes her voice far more than on any previous release, as well as opening her music up to many other sources of inspiration and variety. For instance, she returns to her original instrument, the drums, on this album in a big way. She’s listed as contributing “guitar (electric/acoustic), slide guitar, bass, drums, piano, other randomly weird instruments, tears” to the album, so obviously she’s opened up her repertoire quite a bit. And it’s as impressive as it sounds; she’s seemingly a master at each of these instruments, demonstrating definitive dexterity and deftness all over the carefully crafted songs included on Dreaming of Revenge. All of these newfound options combine to create the most coherent, catchy, diverse, atmospheric, and most of all, accessible, Kaki King album to date.

The album kicks off with “Bone Chaos In the Castle”, which opens the album with a classic style Kaki King guitar riff, but quickly makes way for drums and, gasp, an actual individual melody! An item that most older Kaki King songs lacked, because the melodies were built-in to the rhythm. This song, in my opinion, is a great representation of Kaki King in general. It presents both the acoustic, hammer-on pull-off style of music that she broke into the scene with, as well as the additional melodies and drums and ambient noise that characterizes some of her newer music, as if to say “Hey there, nice to meet you, here are both of my musical sides, get used to ‘em.” This tune gives way to “Life Being What It Is”, a personal song that King refers to as a breakup song. Tender and sweeping, this finger-picked lament is probably my current favorite on the album, possibly because it’s one of Kaki’s most straightforward songs to date — mostly just her guitar and her voice, with some accompanying strings to help with the mood. Speaking of the mood, this song is so intimate that while listening you really get the sense that the music is really an accurate reflection of her mental state and her very being, creating a sort of super empathy, thus accomplishing the very intent of music at its core. “Sad American”, one of my other favorites on the album, is the third song, either lightly brooding or darkly contemplating with a satisfying hook. It’s a very ambient and atmospheric song. “Pull Me Out Alive” throws you at the beginning because, in the midst of these hyper creative songs, it sounds like she’s pulling a page out of the nineties and employing this cliché, staccato method of singing while playing muted power chords, but the chorus makes up for it, and in the rest of the verses, that notion is shattered completely.

“Montreal” is an interesting song because the entire thing is based on the opening guitar riff, which provides the skeleton and foundation of the song. You might think a song with the same guitar riff playing the whole time would be the opposite of fascinating, but I’ll let you experience it for yourself. In my opinion it provides an underlying structure for the song, which allows the rest of the instruments in the song to experiment and be a bit more free. “Open Mouth” is a dreamscape-esque song, which halfway turns a bit darker, aided by rapid violin and a more menacing, minor-key chord progression. “So Much For So Little” catches your attention within moments of beginning due to the syncopated and offbeat rhythm, as well as how the guitar affects it, securing its spot as one of the most entertaining songs on Dreaming of Revenge. “Saving Days In a Frozen Head” is another heavy-hearted, vocal-oriented song, and this one specifically so, because there are so many layers of her voice, which makes this a standout track. The next song, “Air and Kilometers”, is a punchy, choppy, syncopated guitar-centric track that relies on strings to keep it lifted. After listening to the existentially titled “Can Anyone Who Has Heard This Music Really Be A Bad Person?”, I find myself asking the same thing. Kaki seriously rocks out on the drums in this song. It’s moody and intimidating, just like a woman. The closing tune, entitled “2 O’Clock”, is another hushed, intimate song with regretful, melancholy lyrics until about halfway through, when Kaki sings more boldly than she ever has before.

Simply put, Dreaming of Revenge is Kaki King’s best, most creative, most accessible, catchiest, most melodic and emotional album to date, by leaps and bounds. I was going to say that Kaki King knows guitar like the back of her hand, but at this point I think it’d be a crime to not replace “guitar” with “music”. The amount of instruments and the proportion of music she played to the total music on the album is simply astounding. Especially the drums; her style is so fluid and she’s so adaptable, I was unbelievably impressed. She crafts such interesting, smart chord progressions that she manages to make all of her songs sound new – hardly one of them sounds like something you’ve heard before; or if it does, she goes out of her way to change that pretty quickly. Kaki said on this album she wanted to concentrate more on creating hooks and melodies, and she has inarguably and applaudably accomplished that goal — there’s not a song on this album without at least ONE moment that will stay with you. In a recent interview, she said she feels like she’s writing pop songs, even though half of the songs are instrumentals. In some ways she is, but she’s writing them on multiple levels, like applying multiple layers of paint, which is a sign of a competent musician. It has always been clear that she is an incredible musician, but now I think it might be safe to say that she’s a musical genius. It’s obvious that she truly puts tons of time and effort into her music; on the macro scale, where the finished products in general are amazing, and the micro scale, on which she adds tons of little parts that enhance the music in small but important ways, like harmonics, ghost notes, atmospherics, and soaring, spacey slide guitar. In an interview, Kaki King said, “I want people to listen to it and think, ‘This sounds like something completely new, but it also sounds like something Kaki King would do’”. It’s hard to believe how accurate that statement really is; I’ve rarely listened to an artist more self-aware and embodied by his/her music. If you’re a fan, check this out NOW. If you don’t know her, check it out even sooner.