ALBUMS // Katy Kirby – A Cool Dry Place
Post by Tommy
Katy Kirby’s debut A Cool Dry Place is marker-colored with a vibrant sense of composition. Syncopated phrases and idiosyncratic structures build a playful and vibrant playground, but Kirby herself is more slippery, deftly navigating its puzzles and winding corridors. She’s hard to pin down – her voice morphs, autotuned sometimes, “slipping into an accent,” or into layered rounds or the occasional distorted punch-in. Sometimes even the production feels designed to hide her; in songs like “Eyelids” and “Portals” you can almost hear more of the room tone than of Kirby herself. The arrangements stop and start with a sense of careful, shy restraint., and songs will swell with motion and romance until a puttering, obstinate drum part holds back the crest. In the end it doesn’t really sacrifice any richness or romance, but doles it out more quietly and conservatively.
At its core, A Cool Dry Place is made up instead of encounters between Katy Kirby and a series of more self-consciously sketched-in, incomplete characters. Lead single “Juniper” is a birds nest of guitars rustling with a slight breeze of Bossa Nova as she mostly recalls the things she forgot to ask the title character. In “Peppermint,” the subject is “disappearing off a ledge,” as Kirby muses: “I guess he left the way he came in.” In “Fireman,” she calls the subject’s mother to ask for context about his behavior, saying “you can’t pin him like a specimen.” It’s a sensitive kind of documentary songwriting that relegates Kirby herself to accidental glimpses of the camera in the mirror.
But when we catch those glimpses, she appears glowing, warm and empathetic. It’s never broad strokes, but there are revealing details; you can almost hear her fingers on the strings in the hyper-articulate guitars, and there’s a revealing depth of vulnerability in her quiet, sighing voice. Likewise, her good nature as a writer adds generous, tender detail to each character study. In “Traffic!” she tries hard to read more meaning into the subject’s dead-end words (“it is just the way that it is”) and to find excuses for his miserable, privileged attitude. The squirming, unreliable lover in “Fireman,” likewise, is missing half the time, wants to be alone, wants to go out with the boys – he flinches when she tries to take his hand and warns her that she’ll regret it. But in Kirby’s lyrics those descriptions feels like they fall short of criticism or condemnation. She describes him instead as an automat, an animal capable of ditching a limb (here, a tail) in a moment of self preservation. The comparison seems to suggest an earnestness, rather than an irony, like she’s taking pains to see past his need for escape, looking to the hurt and fear that might have caused it. And the intimacy of understanding something like that about someone is a staggering one, almost like a lonely kind of love all its own.
“I got you called up,” she croons, nearly taunting, on “Secret Language,” “and you’re curling in / Do you ever worry that they understand / our secret language?” It does seem to haunt the record quietly that its subjects may not return the favor, may not impart her with the same significance and understanding. The subject of “Tap Twice” comes close to communicating back to her in a shared, secret language but ultimately seems to treat Kirby’s love more as a crutch in desperate moments. Meanwhile she easily sees through the subject of “Cool Dry Place” when he comes to her seeking shelter in a moment of desperation. There’s no judgement, no rejection, but she coolly predicts: “once the dust has settled, / then you’ll know / that you’re gonna get more of me than you bargained for.”
That sense of restraint would defeat the purpose were the record made in less skillful hands. But Kirby’s fundamental warmth and sprightly twang, the comfort of her guitar sensibility and the deeply considered compositions make that shyness one of the greatest assets on A Cool Dry Place. There’s a lonely pain in working hard to understand people who might not imbue us with the same significance, but Kirby’s melancholy is more wandering, less preoccupied. “We’re not boxes, doors, or borders,” she sings. “We were portals.” The characters throughout, it sure seems, are portals by which Kirby reveals herself, sometimes in the shadows they cast, other times in the way their own flaws, wounds, and needs start to outline the values she herself holds dear. A record like this offers ample places to hide – but you’ll find Katy Kirby in it if you can make it important enough to see her.
A Cool Dry Place is available now via Keeled Scales.