Edinburgh songwriter James King delivers a haunting solo debut “Firefly” that transforms trauma into raw, cathartic art

It is very pleasant to hear an artist ready to bleed onto the recording in this day and age of over-production and automated music.

This is exactly what James King‘s first solo record, “Firefly,” does: it lets fans into the soul of an artist who is not afraid to turn personal problems into hauntingly beautiful songs.

As recorded in the darkest areas of Banana Row Studios, this solo debut is a lesson in real vulnerability, bringing together memories of loss, grief, and absence.

Think of Tom Waits’ rough poems run through Evanescence’s dark theatricality and then pulled bare by a drummer who also conducts his own orchestra.

King used to be in the post-punk band SALT. He plays all of the instruments on this album, including guitars, drums, keys, and even bass, like a person taking apart a clock to figure out why it stopped.

With no click track or safety net, there are just layers of sound that build up like ash on a cold winter morning. Producer Robin Woods, who is also known as SALT’s secret weapon, turns this chaos into something strangely exact, like a sound blanket with broken threads.

“Fairytale Run” and “Chimes of Midnight” are two songs that cut through unhealthy relationships and father-son separation with the accuracy of a knife.

King’s songs do not ask people to feel bad for him; they demand it, throwing open doors to places that most artists lock. His autism adds another layer, but it is not a side note. It is a focus.

The patience it took to make this record is similar to the patience it takes to understand the person who made it. This duality hangs like smoke. This neurodiverse point of view might give viewers new ways to look at known emotional areas by using a different set of senses and emotions.

The music on the record comes from a lot of different places. King says that bands like The Who, In This Moment, Evanescence, Tom Waits, Christina Perri, and The Ramones influenced him, but the sound is still very much his own.

This wide range of music sounds like an interesting mix of heavy post-punk, theatrical Gothicism, and vulnerable singer-songwriter introspection.

The broken structure of the record makes me think of the stop-motion movie Coraline. Each track is a pieced-together relic of pain. When King sings, his voice can be both soft and sharp, like Egon Schiele’s rough brushstrokes, which are all nerve ends and no filter. The drums even sound like they are talking, like the skins are telling them things they should not know.

“Firefly,” is a statement and a warning that art does best in places it does not belong. King does not just show you his soul; he gives it to you while it is still beating and dares you to turn away.

Some people might not be able to handle “Firefly,”. It shines a light on the dark passages of human weakness, showing us what we would rather forget and what we need to remember very badly.