Nothing Wrong In Sinking Low

King Krule “Alone, Omen 3” (Live)

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate “Alone, Omen 3” from the experience of the early phase of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. It arrived just before things started to go very badly; this particular live recording is from one of the few shows King Krule was able to perform before Europe went into lockdown mode. This song was fresh in the world when its sentiment – solitude as source of both agonizing loneliness and restorative/meditative self-care, a permission to let yourself feel your sadness, a promise that you are never truly alone – was more potent and relevant than its author could have ever anticipated. There’s no way a lot of the people who probably needed it actually heard it, but at least in my personal experience it was valuable and helpful.

“Alone, Omen 3” sounds like it’s slouching somehow, and there’s a sort of gentle tumbling quality to the arpeggiated guitar and the beat that’s like the lackadaisical gait of a person walking around aimlessly. The bits of exaggerated digital echo in this performance are a nice touch, I imagine it as bits of noisy reality poking through the haze of a loneliness that makes you feel like you’re in a bubble removed from the world. Archy Marshall’s vocal at the end of the song when he’s shouting the reassurance “you’re not alone, you’re not alone” comes across as more broken and desperate in this take, more collapsing in the face of futility than heroic on the album recording. In either case he’s still pushing against something to get this message out, fighting against a world where it’s too easy in the best of conditions to feel atomized and adrift.

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