Southerly reviewed
Southerly
Storyteller & The Gossip Columnist
(Greyday)
Krist Kruger commandeers every aspect of his vision for his pseudonym’s second album, a peculiarily brief exercise in bombast.
Appearing: June 25th at The Note in Chicago.
Storyteller is so overwhelmed by a string section and crashing cymbals, by its end it feels as if 60 minutes have passed when in reality only 39 have. That it ever gets off the ground in the first place is somewhat of a miracle. Kruger wrote, arranged, and engineered this mini epic, and usually such controllishness is a harbinger of doom. Luckily his influences drift more toward the widescreenisms of Calexico and The Decemberists, and often yield themselves to pop stuctures. A blustering symphony only increases his paranoia on “Close To The Crime” so that when most of the excess instruments are pared for “How To Dreamer” its thumping rhythm feels like a stroll.
Still, Kruger’s musical lust often gets the better of him, needlessly weighing down compositions (“Dreams That Make Men Free”), lazily falling back on power pop “Da da das” (“Cold Caller”), and displaying a maddening tendency toward scenery instrumentals. The surface gets a lot of attention, but not so much the core. Despite his heavy handedness Kruger is only distinguished for his appetite. He may think he has a get-out-of-jail card when singing “You don’t know me anyway,” not realizing he’s a prisoner to himself.
— Steve Forstneger
