Legs to Make Us Longer [Enhanced]

Amazon.com
Kaki King fulfills the promise of her debut, Everybody Loves You, with an album that stretches a guitar sound already torn between the compass points. A frenetic player, King is a musical descendent of Michael Hedges, though she usually cites the underrated Preston Reed. Both guitarists employed two-handed tapping techniques to whiplash effect. So does King, although her phrasing is more abstract and her mind still moves faster than her hands at times. Signing up guitar mutant David Torn as producer, King is clearly intent at defying convention. Joined by a sparse rhythm at times, her sound is taking on a slight country edge. You can hear it on "Doing the Wrong Thing," with King playing electric guitar (or a processed acoustic) using her 10-fingered agility to create a rolling melodic counterpoint to the drummer's train rhythm. She rips it up on "Magazine," literally pummeling the fretboard with her fingers, ripping out a mad dervish. She also sings, with a Chet Baker-fragile voice; pleasant, but nothing that makes want to hear that instead of her guitar. --John Diliberto

Legs to Make Us Longer,Kaki King,Red Int / Red Ink,Alternative Folk,Guitar Virtuoso,New Acoustic,Pop,Progressive Folk,Rock,Rock/Pop

Legs to Make Us Longer [Enhanced]

Average customer rating:

WOW, Kaki does it again
Praise for the conquering King
not a good CD
worst guitar recording ever
there's a reason they call her the queen

Legs to Make Us Longer
Kaki King
Manufacturer: Red Int / Red Ink
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music

General | Folk | Styles | Music

Alternative Folk | Contemporary Folk | Folk | Styles | Music

Folk Rock | Rock | Styles | Music

General | Rock | Styles | Music

General | Rock Guitarists | Rock | Styles | Music

Pop Rock | Pop | Styles | Music
Similar Items:

Everybody Loves You
Until We Felt Red
Beyond Boundaries: Guitar Solos
La Guitara: Gender Bending Strings
Aerial Boundaries

ASIN: B0002YLDIM
Release Date: 2004-10-05

Tracks:

Frame
Playing With Pink Noise
Ingots
Doing The Wrong Thing
Solipsist
Neanderthal
Can The Gwot Save Us?
Lies
All The Landslides Birds Have Seen Since The Beginning Of The World
Magazine
My Insect Life

Amazon.com

Kaki King fulfills the promise of her debut, Everybody Loves You, with an album that stretches a guitar sound already torn between the compass points. A frenetic player, King is a musical descendent of Michael Hedges, though she usually cites the underrated Preston Reed. Both guitarists employed two-handed tapping techniques to whiplash effect. So does King, although her phrasing is more abstract and her mind still moves faster than her hands at times. Signing up guitar mutant David Torn as producer, King is clearly intent at defying convention. Joined by a sparse rhythm at times, her sound is taking on a slight country edge. You can hear it on "Doing the Wrong Thing," with King playing electric guitar (or a processed acoustic) using her 10-fingered agility to create a rolling melodic counterpoint to the drummer's train rhythm. She rips it up on "Magazine," literally pummeling the fretboard with her fingers, ripping out a mad dervish. She also sings, with a Chet Baker-fragile voice; pleasant, but nothing that makes want to hear that instead of her guitar. --John Diliberto

Customer Reviews:

WOW, Kaki does it again.......2006-10-22

If you want to hear new things from an acoustic guitar, this album, and King's Everybody Loves You are the ticket. This, her second album, is a little less raw and gritty, a little more polished, but it works just as well. A few tracks are on electric, with accompanyment, a sound to which she has shifted even more on her latest album "...until we felt red." Kaki is extremely talented. I'm eagerly awaiting to hear more music from this stunning artist. Very unconventional, so maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but I love it!

Praise for the conquering King.......2006-09-14

I love this album! In the liner notes, she cites Preston Reed as an influence, but, for me, she is lightyears from Reed. Reed is impressive one song at a time, but after a short while all his songs start to sound alike. King has a better sense of melody, and makes better use of dynamics, much more like Leo Kottke. Her faster songs have drive, and all of her songs have an organic flow. Her slower songs, like "Can The Gwot Save Us", remind me a lot of The Durutti Column. At 45 minutes, the album is on the short side, but that's better than over-staying your welcome, which she certainly does not. When she leaves, you'll still be happy she stopped in, and will look forward to her next visit.

not a good CD.......2006-05-28

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say this is the worst solo guitar recording ever made. Of all the CDs I own, that distinction probably goes to Esteban. But Kaki King gives "Zorro" a run for his money here.

Everything about this CD is bad: the sound of the guitars (thin, processed, brittle); the playing (sloppy, uninspired, poor sense of timing); the songs themselves (unoriginal, predictable, boxy). And then there's Kaki's attempt at singing, which is really quite embarrassing.

Most other artists don't record CDs unless and until they've earned the right to do so after years of practice and dues-paying.

Sounds to me like Kaki King has started her recording career about ten years too early.

worst guitar recording ever.......2006-03-06

Some people may call Kaki King "Kaki Queen," but who cares what her family and friends think! There are a lot of people who use other words to describe her, and they're not very flattering.

But more to the point, this cd is nothing but guitar noodling. They're not even real compositions. It's embarrassing to compare Kaki King to any of the "real" solo acoustic players because she is SO inferior - as a player, as a composer, as an original voice.

And then there's her singing. Terrible singing. Terrible voice.

This is without a doubt the worst guitar recording ever released.

there's a reason they call her the queen.......2006-02-21

I stumbled across this album at a listening station in HMV in Tokyo. Purchasing CDs in Tokyo is no small monetary expense, but I found myself wandering back in to hear more clips of more songs during my lunch breaks, and eventually decided that it was worth the expense. Now, over a year later, the album is still on constant rotation, and while I've sampled other fingerstylists and two-hand tappers to try to expand my acoustic guitar repertoire, none of them have quite managed to match up. Preston Reed has, predictably, come the closest -- it's not without reason that so many reviewers have shunned King for being "nothing but a Preston Reed rip-off." The influence is there, and she, herself, will be the first to assert that, but I really think this is a case of the student surpassing the master. Preston Reed has some absolutely beautiful jazzy/bluesy riffs, and some of the most incredible melody you'll ever hear (and I'm thinking more "sonata" than "new age"). But Kaki has been influenced by more than just Preston; the generation gap is audible, with the clear presence of 90s rock and (dare I say it?) ambient electronica in her sound.

Kaki King's songs don't always follow the crescendo-climax-decrescendo that we expect of instrumental music, nor do they follow the instrumental version of a verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus pop song. She's not afraid to start and end a song in the same place, not sitting still but moving laterally instead of forwards. There is often no sense of "resolution" at the end of her songs. This was even more the case in her first album, "Everybody Loves You," which is probably why it was a critical success but didn't get the popular notice that "Legs to Make Us Longer" has. That, by the way, is the ambient electronica influence I mentioned. I think parallels can be drawn between Kaki King's albums and Boards of Canada's first two, but in reverse order: "Legs" is to "Music Has the Right to Children" as "Everybody" is to "Geogaddi," with the former having clearer songs-structures and the latter being more atmospheric, but all being more about the situation and the experience than they are about the story of the music.

Everybody has influences. Kaki King wears hers on her sleeve, but as patches, torn up with a jagged blade and re-stitched into something a lot more colourful and less predictable, with a lot of pieces added in. I wholeheartedly recommend this album to anyone for whom the word "instrumental" is not an immediate turnoff.