WUVT veteran and Woove staff writer Todd Stafford reviews Kaki King's latest release, Junior (2010).

Kaki King’s new release “Junior” offers a very uneven listening experience.

The album recalls her past moderately assertive album “Dreaming of Revenge” more frequently than the unassuming coherence of her earlier efforts. Sadly, this is because the best moments on “Junior” are reminiscent of Katherine King’s highly successful transition from percussive acoustic instrumentals to electronically-infused atmospheric pop on the album “Until We Felt Red;” these gems are likely to be lost on listeners who refuse to traverse a moat of pop-rock sensibility. Which isn’t to say that the rock songs on the new album are completely without merit, but simply to say that they fail to live up to the promise of both Kaki King’s early albums and more recent outstanding compositions like “Air and Kilometers” or “Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers.”

Equally, the transitions between the more up-tempo and vocally oriented tracks and the lushly multi-tracked guitar-focused slow songs can be a little jarring. In fact, they suggest that there was little cogent attempt to create an album; instead, “Junior” retains a somewhat arbitrary-seeming sequence of individual tracks.

But, given that most listeners will download a track or two from the iTunes Store or on BitTorrent, perhaps this criticism suggests outmoded expectations.

Despite these critiques, fans of contemporary indie pop bands like Tegan and Sara or The Bird and the Bee might find in Kaki King’s rock songs more sophisticated and compositionally rewarding versions of a popular hipster aesthetic, while her retro angle might discover unexpected vocal similarities to bands like Liz Phair.

In the process, one can hope that they notice the amazing “folktronica,” math-rock and post-rock elements that are cleverly folded into some of the best songs. If so, perhaps these instrumental interludes will ultimately lead them to discover the ground-breaking and beautiful experimentation of Kaki King’s early albums.

One track in particular, “Hallucinations from My Poisonous German Streets,” should send new listeners looking through the back catalog. Though it opens with an instrumental figure interweaving slide guitar with a rather minimal electric piano harmony and an understated down-tempo beat, the track changes course about halfway through and introduces a slowly delivered mumble with gradually building percussion. Digitally processed guitar closely follows her pretty vocals, emphasizing the pleasing interplay of timbres while diminishing the focus on lyrical content. Pairing Jordan Perlson’s stellar drum chops with organ-like slide guitar riffs, the conclusion evokes a sense of profound and abstract drama.

But most of the pop and rock tracks showcase vocals, especially the paranoia-inducing opener “The Betrayer,” the prog-rock encounter with a “runaway delivery truck” on “Death Head,” and the depressing and simple composition “Sunnyside.”

On “Sunnyside,” King self-consciously meditates on a failed relationship and feelings of loss, abandonment and absence. Her lyrics offer a pastiche of self-reproach, angry four-letter words, mild irony and over-wrought nostalgic metaphor that evoke early Bright Eyes, while her voice suggests the morose simplicity of Azure Ray: “Now all we can say we have are some photographs and a Wiener Dog that chews up everything I love and all the things you left behind . . . You’re the girl I lost in Sunnyside/ You’re the girl I lost to Sunnyside.”

The best tracks on the album feature no vocals at all. Indeed, the stand-out track is the three-part instrumental “My Nerves That Committed Suicide,” which complements a hypnotic finger-picked steel guitar with an ethereal lead on lap steel guitar before the finger-picking modulates to a more aggressive strummed electric rock sound and Perlson’s drums kick in to bring the track to a climax. Quickly following is a quiet denouement that recapitulates the laid-back introduction.

Similarly, the electrofolk interlude “Everything Has an End Even Sadness” meanders through a landscape of finger-picked guitar, synth seagulls, ballad drumming and a harmony part that sounds like it could have been harvested in Clara Rockmore’s garden. Combining a conservative folktronica aesthetic with a neo-minimalist compositional strategy akin to Tortoise, “Sloan Shore” offers an equally compelling example of Kaki King’s immense talent for crafting beautiful instrumentals.

Certainly, we could hope for more from Kaki King, or perhaps wish that she separated her wildly different approaches to songwriting by releasing two shorter albums. But, doubtlessly, other critics will see in the album’s incoherence a virtuous eclecticism. And, despite the weaknesses of some of the more up-tempo rock songs in comparison to both earlier releases and her more stately compositions, overall “Junior” proves to be a decent album with a few excellent moments.