This live album is an intense, electric, and sometimes uncanny exhibition of Archy Marshall’s ability to reimagine his songs on stage.
Pieced together from the three shows King Krule managed to play in 2020 before COVID rolled in—a couple in Paris, including one for Jehnny Beth’s Echoes program, and one in Amsterdam—You Heat Me Up, You Cool Me Down is a live album that hints at what could have been. Featuring performances in support of last year’s Man Alive!, the set offers an exhibition of Archy Marshall’s ability to reimagine his songs in a live setting. It also captures the unique transfer of energy between performer and audience that can only happen with a stage and a sticky floor.
This isn’t Marshall’s first live album—that was Live on the Moon, in 2018—but it is the only one he’s released after being forced to cancel an intercontinental tour, so it’s safe to say that it’s carrying a little extra weight. The setlist offers a fairly even spread of tracks from Man Alive! and 2017’s excellent The OOZ, along with a handful of crowd pleasers from his 2013 debut 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, making for something of a greatest-hits trawl. On stage, these songs take on a new exuberance and intensity. The sludgy guitars of “Stoned Again” and the unhinged sax on “Comet Face” pack a kick that’s absent on the studio recordings; the bass is puffed up throughout, offering thick, grippy hooks for Marshall’s drawled vocals to hang off.
The performances are intense and electric: Slouched verses set up a dizzying slingshot effect for the moments, as on “Alone, Omen 3” or “Rock Bottom,” when Marshall opts to soar into a chorus. Frenzied interplay with his regular five-piece touring band—featuring sax, keys, bass, guitar, and drums—opens dynamic space for Marshall’s psychedelic songwriting, defined by its twisted structures and occasional apoplectic outbursts. “Half Man Half Shark” elides its indie-disco strictures with an added dose of aggression, and comes out better for it. “Alone, Omen 3” rends its pop chops in favor of funky delay pedals and UFO synth effects; it’s brilliantly, magnetically delirious.
Crowd noises are wheeled in at odd intervals, often to provide an illusion of continuity between the stitched recordings. The feeling is uncanny, a reminder that it’s still a bit weird to hear music being played live and loud at the moment. There’s polite applause for the most part—and one excitable guy shouting out “How you doing, Archy?” after “Stoned Again”—until the closing performance of “Easy Easy.” All of a sudden, you’re thrown into the throng, ensconced in the familiar buzz of anticipation and friendly boos when Marshall announces, so nonchalantly you could miss it, that this is the last song. Here, the adoring mass is conjured perfectly, singing back the bridge as it builds, before being drowned out—despite their loudest efforts—by the wall of guitars and grit-strained vocals.
It’s a moment tinged with the familiar, sinking realization that the show is nearly over and the comedown is about to begin. What’s a live album for, if not to stir exactly this fervent mix of feelings? And, of course, to provide the option of pressing play and repeating the experience all over again.
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