Katy Kirby – Cool Dry Place
Keeled Scales – 19 February 2021
Katy Kirby is conventionally unconventional on Cool Dry Place. Just at the point where you think you’ve got her figured out she throws in a line that sends everything into a cocked hat. Her first album, years in the making, is charming, yet within the charms are also snakes. Not everything is what it seems to be and all of the sudden you start questioning everything. It’s an odd experience, the kind that is difficult to pull off, especially when you make it look so easy.
Kirby has spent the past few years undermining her upbringing. Born and raised in small town Spicewood, Texas. Home schooled by two ex-cheerleaders, she sang in church youth groups and drank the Kool-Aid of evangelical Christianity. She has also spent a long time unlearning that righteous fundamentalism, distancing herself from the dogma, working on a much more complicated world view.
Cool Dry Place subverts the forms she grew up learning. It can be bright and bouncy beyond belief, while distilling lyrics in ways that add more than a little bite to the sweetness. Amidst the guitars, piano and drums playing their hearts out, on “Juniper” Kirby sings lyrics that blend brightness with bite, “You don’t need a reprimand to know/ Just when a vengeful god will strike her blow.” Besides being an amazing turn of phrase, the use of the pronoun “her” suggests that she is no longer bound to ways of old school Christianity. It’s a new day.
With a wonderfully pure voice, she takes risks that might seem out of place until you realize that they work. Traffic! is a song reflecting on someone whose life seems to be just about perfect yet can’t see what is right in front of his face. Kirby sings sweetly against an electric guitar backing, “I followed you into traffic/ I never thought about asking/ What we were going to do/ When we got where we wanted to get to.” As the song builds. Kirby begins using autotune to remarkable effect. Electric guitars get more strident when suddenly everything peels back to just a church organ followed by a huge chorus of Kirbys. That particular duality also comes through as the lyrics recount, “Well, it’s easy for you to say/ Standing there with your future all aligned/ But it isn’t for you to say/ When you get off easy every time.” It’s a chilling reality.
Sounding sad and undone by everything, Portals looks at life sometimes as untethered as the accompanying, barely-there musical backing track. Yet there is also something about it that may be just a bit whimsical as the opening suggests, “I’m an alternate universe in Target lingerie/ You’re a country song in three-four time.” Yet at the heart, this song suggests that we can’t really know much of anything, “And if we reunite, will we still know/ The things that we had learned before?/ We’re not boxes, doors, or borders/ We were portals.” The question is, of course, where does the portal lead.
Sometimes the boldest statements are the ones that are least expected. Katy Kirby has found a way to turn just about everything on its head. As an opening statement, Cool Dry Place is more than just an instruction on a box of Tylenol, it is the kind of statement that announces a new voice ready to be heard again and again.
Cool Dry Place is out now.
Bandcamp: https://katykirbyon.bandcamp.com/album/cool-dry-place-3
Store for LP (Texas smoke or black vinyl)/CD/Tape: https://keeledscales.com/store/katykirby
Watch/Listen: http://smarturl.it/katykirby
Photo Credit: Jackie Lee Young