Gruff-around-the-edges rocker Elle King became famous for her 2014 single “Ex’s & Oh’s,” the hook of which — “My ex’s and the oh oh oh’s they haunt me” — is a quintessential “Millennial Whoop,” the most ubiquitous sound in modern pop. But King is not your average pop star. “I’m not America’s sweetheart,” she declares on her first album. After a promising early career, King’s second album “Shake the Spirit” shows her truly defining her own exciting sound.
The album, released last Friday, oscillates between party come-ons and late-night vulnerability. In the opening track “Talk of the Town,” King asserts herself in the neighborhood and advises the town’s latest male fixation not to count her out. Layered over a manic guitar, the bluesy coyness is easy listening but belies the depth of the album.
King devotes much of her runtime to gender expectations, infidelity and divorce. “Man’s Man” shifts the album away from love games featuring blustering rogues and toward marriage tatters. In a low growl, King addresses a “hard man / a real man’s man.” After a sharp drop off in the percussive beat, she sings into a brief almost silence that he can now go and “be some other man’s man.” Lamenting “It only took three weeks / to hustle me into being your wife,” King treats the marriage like a con, but rather than dissolve into anger, King turns selfward.
She follows “Man’s Man” with “Naturally Pretty Girls,” thereby juxtaposing hyper-typical gender structures and deriding each. In sync with echoey, atmospheric backup vocals, she dismisses waking up “boring and beautiful” yet acknowledges “it’s rewarding to be beautiful.” The equal weight given to the opposing lyrics suggests a struggle to exist outside pop-slick womanhood, especially when navigating both marriage and life under the camera eye. This rejection may call back to her earlier single “America’s Sweetheart,” but rather than offering easy resolution such as “kick[ing] up the soul,” here King leaves the tension to linger.
“Naturally Pretty Girls” is more realistic, a wiser older sibling to the still hopeful “America’s Sweetheart,” but the track is only a warm-up to the aggressive “It Girl.” Here King takes on a down-for-a-good-time persona that mocks the fruitless chase for conventional female identity. She croons “In middle school, I wasn’t very cool” as rote acknowledgement of how early “It Girl” fantasies begin. The brassy track is quieter than its predecessors and leaves full attention on King’s adaptation of the “It Girl” to the “call girl” and “the s—t, girl.” Even “Momma,” a character who appears on “Shame” and “Man’s Man” as a figurative of judgment, comes under fire: “Momma's acting so innocent / Don't doubt it / When she was your age she was all about it.”
These undercurrents of anger are a refreshing “shake” of an oft-homogenized Top 40 chart. In rejecting celebrity perfection, King extends a hand to everyday audiences. She invites vulnerability and loneliness in “Runaway,” resignation in “Sober,” and longing in “Chained.” The downbeat tracks balance the album’s opening bravado and flesh out the album’s journey from catch-and-release partying to a renewed love.
King closes the album with “Little Bit of Lovin’,” a track punctuated with frequent choral “ooh’s” and stop-and-go piano. Here, King reconciles her independence, “I don’t need nobody / I don’t need no one,” with her desire to try again, “But I still got a little bit of lovin' left in me.” The roughly six-and-a-half minute track breaks along the 2:45 mark for an interlude which flirts with cheesiness but never quite succumbs to it. King does claim “When I say the word I / I mean everyone, because we are all one,” which may seem too easy given her early exploration of differing social expectations for men and women, but nonetheless helps to end “Shake the Spirit” on a note of unity, within both the romantic and the listener-King relationships.
With “Shake the Spirit,” a skilled follow-up to 2015’s “Love Stuff,” King continues to shake up alternative rock. Though most known for that “Ex’s & Oh’s” single, King proves with this album that her career is only beginning.
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