Blue Raspberry

Katy Kirby

explicit

Released on 26-01-2024 by Anti - Epitaph
Main artists: Katy Kirby
Genre: Alternative en Indie

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Language available : english

Katy Kirby's debut, 2021's Cool Dry Place, was a delight; her second album is even better.

Exuding a Brill Building vibrancy, it holds echoes of Regina Spektor and Rufus Wainwright's pomp melancholy, with orchestral parts arranged by Rowen Merrill. Kirby has said that, once she accepted she was writing love songs, "I wanted them to sound like they were bidding for a spot in the wedding reception canon." Songs like "Drop Dead" fizz with an air of curiosity if not mischief; it's piano pop without strictly being for piano. Kirby has a vivid way with imagery, as when she suggests on "Cubic Zirconia"—a jaunty bit of easy-roll country folk—that beauty can come with modesty. "Cubic Zirconia/ Baby, no one can tell/ When they're up against your throat/ You know they shine just as well," she sings, admiring a "face framed by hoodie like an oyster in a shell." The crystalline analogy comes into play again, albeit with a hint of skepticism, on "Salt Crystal." But by the time the title track rolls around, in the form of a sweet ballad, Kirby's view of synthetic beauty is tinged. "I am under her heel like rock candy/ Crushed to glitter laid out on the concrete," she sings, later adding, "Her eyes burn white as Styrofoam right into me." Kirby's first record was about coming out from a sheltered evangelical Christian upbringing in Texas (she didn't hear artists like Coldplay until attending Belmont University in Nashville). Her sophomore effort is a sonic scrapbook of her first queer relationship, with the title track written even before Kirby knew the truth about herself. There are highs, as when she sings of happiness and love as a "Double-triple backflip off the high dive" on the supertender "Party of the Century." With its Carpenters melody and tremulous strings, there’s common ground with Clairo's gently percolating music. Like Clairo, too, Kirby's voice is cozy, warm and lilting, making it a safe space for the emotional lows of Blue Raspberry, as when she sings, "Must have been such an awful night/ What I can't remember won't hurt me/ Thank God in advance, I'm already forgetting" on "Hand to Hand," the instruments stepping delicately, deliberately. "You're doing the work now/ You're trying so hard/ This one goes out to your redemption arc," Kirby sings on "Redemption Arc." Life imitating the construct of a movie script, the song sounds like it could soundtrack such a cinematic scene: The melancholic melody blooms into a flash of grandiosity, before quietening down as if remembering its shyness. But that won't handicap Kirby, who tells herself to "Swing for the fences," on folky, sweet "Fences." © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

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Blue Raspberry

Katy Kirby

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Redemption Arc