Katy Kirby's Cool Dry Place: soft but subversive folk-pop
Lifestyle
Kirby’s sharp lyrics, layered melodies and complex manipulation of rhythm markher out as an exciting and sophisticated songwriter. The singer-songwriter Katy Kirby was brought up in small-town Texas and learned to sing at church, where, in the mid-1990s, “Christian contemporary music” reigned. She has since detached from her faith, but something so engrained is difficult to leave behind. Her debut record, Cool Dry Place, doesn’t reference these facts directly, but it does expertly conjure a sense of existentialtension. At first, it might seem as though there is nothing tense at all about Kirby’s soft, folky sound, her triple-filtered-mineral-water voice and the record’s muffled, cassette-tape feel. The album opens with hazy strumming on a barely audible acoustic guitarand Kirby’s voice, which begins on an upwards arpeggiothen quickly falls again: “I pray, I pray, for your eyelids.”The track – aptly named “Eyelids”– continues, slowly, quietly, fuzzily, with a bedroom-pop intimacy and the sort of resigned, meandering melodies that soothe the listener into letting out a long sigh. Though Kirby returns to this sad, reflective mood later on the album, what happens next...
New Statesman
Feb 19, 2021