KAKI KING JUNIOR (ROUNDER)
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King is most famous for her unrepentantly virtuosic instrumental guitar music, which mixes Kottke-esque fingerpicking with showy-but-sweet metal tricks—she’s one of very few women with a signature guitar model—but over the course of her three most recent albums she’s swerved toward indie rock, or something like it. First she just toyed with rock dynamics and added some quiet, tentative singing, but on Junior, she’s bringing it all, at gale force.
King dissects the relationship-that-was from a constantly shifting place; confessions of guilt and blame ping-pong back and forth. On the album opener, “The Betrayer,” she casts herself as the one who killed it: “I had my own life to save,” she says, selfish and controlled. But the record closes with the frayed, melancholy “Sunnyside,” where King is alone with the relics of domesticity: “Some photographs and a wiener dog . . . all the things you left behind,” she sings, lingering on “left behind” so that it’s clear she’s one of those things.
