The six-string tone poems that comprise Kaki King‘s catalog make for solitude-seeking, late-night-driving, rain-spattered-windowpanes, holed-up-in-your-bedroom music. Even for a modern-day Guitar God (as Rolling Stone so anointed her in 2007) who can count Dave Grohl as her number-one fan (“there are some guitar players that are really fucking good, and then there’s Kaki King,” he once said), appropriating that sound for Hipster Central on a Saturday night can’t come easy.

So when King stepped onstage at Music Hall of Williamsburg in her orange Chuck Taylors and announced to much audience sympathy that she’d recently suffered a ruptured eardrum, not only did making that changeover seem an even more remote possibility, but it was hard to shake the feeling throughout King’s 14-song set that holed up in her bedroom was exactly where she’d rather be.

Still, she dutifully plowed through, plucking spare, haunting notes out of a ukelele above the menacing, driving beat of “Falling Day” before switching to her trademark Adamas for a pair of signature instrumentals. “Bone Chaos in the Castle” featured the remarkable, over-the-fret string tapping that made her famous. (For those mystified by King’s damn-near-revolutionary playing, an improv session about halfway through the night glimpsed into her genius; tuning her strings to approximate something close to a Bm9 chord, she easily fiddled into an appealing groove and showered her fingerboard with harmonics.) On the cinematic “So Much for So Little,” back-up musician Dan Brantigan played what King later swore was a bong — see, holed-up-in-your-bedroom shit — that had been plugged into a laptop to make it sound like a woodwind.

While lyrical pop pieces like “Falling Day” and the fourth and catchiest song of the night, “Pull Me Out Alive,” amp up a crowd, serious-minded instrumentals like the new “Come Closer” just as easily render it a bunch of hushed if satisfied shoegazers. Same went for “Untitled (You’re the Girl I Lost to Sunnyside),” a sweet, little wrist-slicer in which King dabbles with melancholy and pathos (“Yeah, I fucked up good and well/ And you put me through fucking hell/ But good luck finding someone who can love you better than I”) and exposed the warbly plainness that both plagues her live vocal performances and makes them all the more emotive.

But smackdab silence is never good, which even King surmised when she said, “This just got awkward.”
Granted, she had just described the stank on her pillowcase the morning her ear went kablooey, which was apparently so grody even her dog would not come near. About 30 minutes later she would lament, “I am so ready to get into my pajamas.” I finally decided that I felt the same way.