To introduce their debut album, Cannibals With Cutlery (available to buy physically and digitally): two elephant seals fighting each other. The video for leading single, Cold Skin: what can only be described as clowns gone wrong wrestling. Although on the surface To Kill A King’s promotional material appears to be nothing other than plain bizarre, delve a little deeper and you start to uproot what the five piece is all about; they are connoisseurs of the alternative-folk genre, but with evidently more emphasis on the ‘alternative’ aspect than the ‘folk’. It’s fortunate as the genre can be one full of clichés and stereotypes happily conformed to but, with 100,000+ views of Cold Skin (and counting), it’s a quirkiness the listening public are clearly embracing.
Wolves, for example, is accompanied by a faint synth-based beat that would not be so out of place in the EDM scene, whilst Children Who Start Fires is kept company by drums that are surprisingly bongo-like. Even more curious, though, is frontman Ralph Pelleymounter’s choice not to make full use of his deliciously baritone vocal chords on Fictional State, but instead opting for a style not so dissimilar to that of Mike Skinner of The Streets. And the album, maybe even the alt-folk genre as a whole, is much more refreshing as a result.
But it’s not just the London outfit’s overly aggressive elephant seals and pseudo-clowns that can be read into. So, too, can the album title, Cannibals With Cutlery. As previously established, the band likes things to be on the slightly unconventional side, thus accounting for ‘Cannibals’. As for the ‘With Cutlery’, one can turn to the sheer sophistication of the album; sure the layers of brass and strings featured on over half of the tracks brings a certain refinement to proceedings, but it is the band’s use of the instruments that really shine through. As expected, the boys make use of the manpower to hand in obvious ways – Choices has to be described as majestic and Funeral nothing short of epic – but in other instances the orchestral sections really help to evoke feeling and emotion that is otherwise unreachable; it is difficult to imagine the power of Gasp and the contrasting tenderness of Family without TKAK using the help offered from the classical genre to such good effect.
It is their maturity, their ability to see what works and what doesn’t, their capability to work with what they have and haven’t got (compare a stripped back Sofar to a recording studio packed out with an orchestra) that confirms To Kill A King are ready to gobble up the world before them. Let’s hope they’ve got enough cutlery, because they’re going to need it.
