Kevin MF King Peels An Orange, Draws Blood

A chugging acoustic guitar. A trombone groaning at the low end of its range. A simple, driving beat. It all gets the motor running on ​“Bat Man Hasil,” the opening track from Kevin MF King’s Description of an Orange Being Peeled. When the song is off and running, the vocals come in.

“Driving down the road feeling like i had enough,” King sings. ​“Drunk driving makes me give up / Got a failed idea of what’s down or up / Driving down the road feeling like i had enough / to rationalize this nonsense, I’m done / The highway is looking like these pictures / Lost luck.”

There’s an ominous, nervous energy to the whole song from the beginning that finds its release in layers of squalling guitars, actual alarms and police sirens, and gang vocals provided by what King calls The Divine & Merry Carpet Bomber Prayer Circle.

It’s as fitting an introduction as any to the music of the often New Haven-based but sometimes nomadic musician Kevin MF King. His brutally honest songwriting, and similarly honest delivery, fuel an album that claws its way across folk and punk, finds the similarities between those sometimes divergent styles, and takes the listener along in the process.

It can be a bracing trip. ​“Mother’s Day Meth” musically has all the trappings of a great Irish drinking song — the careening waltz tempo, the uplifting chord changes, the lyrics riding a triumphant melody. But this song isn’t about drinking with friends, or missing the homeland. This song is about bidding good riddance to a toxic relationship. ​“Glad I’m gone / Glad you’re gone / Glad it’s over / Fuck you,” the gang vocals all shout together in a singalong that’s as cathartic as it is blunt.

Is it a little much? Maybe for some. But it also shoots straight for, and hits, an unvarnished truth: that some close relationships — whether with friends, lovers, or family — can be really, really bad for us. It’s okay to end them, and even to feel good about that. Though the raggedness built into the song also suggests that King knows it’s not that easy to walk away. The anger, the bitterness, remains.

The ideas and the energy keep coming. ​“Plague Doctor” finds King at his most despairing on the album, as a radio in the background struggles to find a station. ​“Both Stories” is technically an instrumental, but a visit to the song’s Bandcamp page — a pretty clever use of Bandcamp’s format — reveals a piece of prose that can be read in just about the amount of time it takes to listen to the song, if you can read fast.

With so much traveling, searching, moving on this album, it’s right that its closer, ​“A Nice Way to Put Me Down,” ends on a question. Like ​“Both Stories,” the song itself is an instrumental, but unlike ​“Both Stories,” the text accompanying this one is just two sentences: ​“Never mean a word you say, then why’d you say it? If you don’t know who told the lie, then why’d you spread it?” It’s easy to imagine these two questions spoken over and over while the music plays. King could’ve recorded it that way. But instead, he puts the words in the listener’s head — is it in King’s voice or someone else’s? Maybe the listener’s own? — and lets the music do its work.

Were we looking for an answer? King doesn’t offer one. But sometimes the answers to tough questions are too cheap, anyway. Sometimes it’s the questions that matter.