Album Review: A Distant Fist Unclenching by Krill

As we grow older, at some point we begin to lose interest in the critical currency of our inward gaze. The staggering pillars of judgment against ourselves and our friends should begin to topple, leaving an array of complex qualities that live outside of the traditional definitions we’ve clung to. This will perhaps be due to new levels of personal growth of the subjects of our gaze—your “funny friend”, for example, no longer relies on their sense of humor to keep relationships alive but has found a way to be more themselves, allowing other facets of their personality to shine—but it is no small part a by product of the development of the witness.

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Boston rockers Krill may only be on their third album, but they have an ever-expanding cult following that trails them with unflinching devotion. For them, Krill’s music is modern medicine. Following the semi-concept EP Steve Hears Pile in Malden and Bursts into Tears, the band that loves poop jokes is moving on to embrace life’s uncertainties on A Distant Fist Unclenching.

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Nothing about Krill is ever unclenched, unless it is to be clenched again, and rapidly. Visual tableaux brought to mind by this record: someone (grimacing) in their early twenties imagining a well-used stress ball gripped in the right hand of a person standing in well-furnished office, person embedded in middle age and the attendant visible and assumed lifestyle solidities that come with that stage of life, as they repeatedly squeeze this ball while a gradual sense of ease invades their face, from the fringes toward the center, mouth fanning out into a kind of travel-agent advertising smile. Like, our actual subject experiencing this thought is immersed in an almost radical kind of inertness: thinking of someone squeezing a stress ball with regards to their own state of mind, as opposed to engaging in any form of action.

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There was a time when you might have confused Krill with a band who cared more about actual shit than giving one. "Turd", from a 2014 EP released by the grunge-pop Boston slackers, found frontman Jonah Furman imagining himself as the titular piece of fecal matter. "If I could just be ate/ At least someone might say I was worthy," he sings, resigned to a life as an undigested peanut.

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