Mike Krol - Turkey

Pitchfork 74

The title of singer/guitarist/drummer Mike Krol's third album is a bowling reference, used for when you get three strikes in a row. On a poster in the liner notes, he is pictured holding two gold records, with tags beneath each reading, "to commemorate the sale of no more than 500 copies." Clearly, Krol has a sense of humor about himself, and his position.

But his Merge debut isn't hangdog at all. It has a do-or-die desperation: The sound is scuzzy, but the energy is pure, bristling with the aim to be stronger and more memorable than the two that came before it. When Krol whines and shouts lines like "you've been warned that I'm not fooling around," you believe him. The song that line comes from, by the way, is called "Neighborhood Watch", and it's sung to somebody who stole his bike. This is one of Krol's strongest suits; taking a small and seemingly silly premise, making it universal and hiding at least one line in each song that could be pulled from it to form a mission statement. "The world can't stop me now," he sings in "Cactuses", a song about being mad at the pain that a cactus has caused him.

Krol recorded Turkey in just four days, co-producing with Elliott Kozel, who also plays piano and synth on the album. Engineer Beau Sorenson improves upon the sound of Krol's first two albums, without compromising any of the shambolic glory. Instruments are panned hard, handclaps occasionally emerge through thick fuzz and squalls of feedback, and at the center of it all is Krol's nasally voice, singing sweet melodies through a guitar amp and hitting effects pedals at just the right time. He sings with the uncontainable excitement of an underdog finally realizing his dreams, and the album courses with the adrenaline of newfound confidence.

It's hard to resist comparing Krol's voice to John Dwyer or King Tuff, and Krol seems ready to dispel any accusations of bandwagon-jumping. "I feel left out of every city and scene I belong to," he sings on a track that is unambiguously titled, "Left Out (ATTN: SoCal Garage Rockers)". Neither of those aforementioned artists call southern California home though, so he must be throwing shade at Wavves, right?

If Turkey just misses greatness, it's because it's just too short. The whole thing is over in 18 minutes. This is the downside to spending only four days recording. And with the way that Turkey is sequenced, you can feel the slow deflation of the world-conquering drive. The album is front-loaded with biting rock that eventually devolves into "Piano Shit", a song which is just a Dustin O'Halloran-ish re-working of the previous track. (It's called "Less Than Together", and Krol's singing is less-than-in-tune on it.) The song "Save the Date", where Krol anticipates an invitation to the wedding of an ex, hints at deeper moods, but it, too, is over too quickly, a verse shy of poignance. You can hear Krol's asides to the engineer on Turkey, just as you can in his previous releases, and they hint at his gradually expanding ambition. His 2011 album, I Hate Jazz, ends with him simply asking, "Did that sound even close?" Turkey finds him zeroing in: "Did that sound better?"