Album Review: Kungens Män, Kungens Ljud & Bild
Hail the kingsmen, as the many triumphant journeys of Swedish heavy psychedelic explorers Kungens Män have led them to the cosmos itself. Kungens Ljud och Bild is both the name of the record and the name of the band’s imprint handling the European side of the release — the US is out through Centripetal Force — and it translates to ‘The King’s Sound and Vision.’ Immediately, the mostly-instrumental but for some rather urgent spoken word in Swedish on “I Hjalles kök” (“In Hjalle’s Kitchen”) long-player sets its synesthetic standard. And the five-song/55-minute offering from the Stockholm six-piece only meets it along the way, melding improv-rooted jamming with mellow space and krautrock, resulting in the multi-tiered hypnosis of a song like the also-appropriately-named, 15-minute “Stora rummet” (“Large Room”), which follows opener “När piskan viner” (“When the Whip Wines”) and layers drifty bounces of synth or guitar or whatever it is behind a sunshiny guitar figure like they’re the string section the band was able to get cheap because they’re from an alternate dimension.
Yes, that’s a compliment. Here’s another: a band of this style — any of them — will fall entirely flat without chemistry. I don’t care how talented the guitarist or the bassist or the keyboardist or the drummer or whoever is. If it doesn’t gel, the band will suck, then die. Kungens Män launch “När piskan viner” like it’s a rocket to Charon with stops on the way for gas, and the space-bound motion of that song — shorter at just 7:44 than everything save the closer “Stora rummet (Edit),” at 5:58 — establishes outright that wherever they’re going on the songs that follow, the listener can be well assured they’ll reach their destination. Comprised of guitarists Hans Hjelm, Gustav Nygren and Mikael Tuominen (the latter also vocals, bass), bassist Magnus Öhrn, synthesist Peter Erikson and drummer Mattias Indy Pettersson, Kungens Män are able to conjure both the haze and the clearest path through it. Maybe that’s the sound and vision. It would make a fitting kind of sense, since on Kungens Ljud & Bild, often it’s both at once.
As straightforward a signal the opening riff of “När piskan viner” is — it’s time to go! — the prevailing vibe throughout Kungens Ljud & Bild is more serene than pushy. That’s not to say that the vinyl-concluding/digitally-penultimate “Vaska lyckokaka” (“Scrap a Fortune Cookie”) doesn’t find its way into a gorgeous outbound progression across its 11-minute span. On the contrary. In what sounds like a piece carved out of a longer exploration as it fades in at the start, what’s captured in the early moments of that song is crucial to understanding how Kungens Män manifest the chemistry noted above. The drums come in locked into a swinging groove over some fuzzier low end and an accompanying casual guitar strum that soon finds a complementary shape. Keys are there, a cleaner guitar tone arrives. Sounds like everybody’s aboard by about 1:10, and they’re underway with an odd note here for good measure, but soon that clean tone is topping the backing swirl with a somehow-dreamy progression that lasts until after three minutes in as a fuzzier guitar arrives to complement, growing more manic for a few seconds, trading off getting back in line, and so on.
You don’t necessarily realize it yet, but Kungens Män are talking here, and the transition is already under way. There’s a brighter guitar tone in the mix as of 4:59, and that begins to shift the rhythm between the other two strains and over the next minute it pushes the lead clean tone to space out, which it has done by the time they’re at 6:30, though the motion is so smooth it’s hard to pinpoint any more exact time when it happens (they say 5:43, but I’m not sure). And from then on, they’re free to introduce wavelengths of distortion, to let the keyboard go wandering, and to gradually bring the procession to a natural conclusion with a final, somewhat understated, cymbal crash. This isn’t just the kind of thing that not everybody can do. It’s an unspoken communication of creativity between six individuals, and even among heavy psychedelic acts — hell, even among mostly-instrumental, jam-minded heavy psychedelic acts with a penchant for warm tones and classic grooves — that makes Kungens Män stand out.
The prior “I Hjalles kök” works similarly in fading up from what was probably a jam that gradually took this shape, and I don’t know whether Tuominen‘s spoken vocals over it — drawing from a notebook of nonsense songtitles according to the band, arranged and delivered like poetry — happened at the time or were layered in later, but it feels perhaps like a response on the band’s part to the inevitable question of why they don’t have a singer, which in their case is even more ridiculous because the core of their project is so outside the realm of verses and choruses they’d be a completely different band if they did.
But the mad David Byrne-esque Swedish poetics does the job well enough, and emphasizes Kungens Män‘s willingness to experiment as regards the central tenets of their approach, the detail and complexity of the instrumental progression beneath his voice supporting but not at all staid with an uptempo drum progression and tense low-frequency fuzz. Above all of this, uniting the two sides of the album with their varied takes and even including the edit of “Stora rummet” on the end of the DL, Kungens Ljud & Bild is rife with purpose. Those familiar with the band will find it a more active release on average than 2020’s Trappmusik (review here), but will already know as well that these things are not all one or the other.
Consider though that among the sundry live and studio offerings Kungens Män have made over their 10 years together, this is the closest they’ve ever come to releasing a self-titled album. If one extrapolates from that a kind of representation of the band’s part of who they believe they are, then this material feels all the more definitive. More likely, however — and a negative perhaps for clean narrative but certainly a positive for the actual listening experience — this particular world is one more stop along Kungens Män‘s progressive journey, and there will be more to find as they continue forward.
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Tags: Centripetal Force, Kungens Ljud & Bild, Kungens Män, Kungens Män Kungens Ljud & Bild, Stockholm, Sweden
