Fawn / Brute

Album review

Just as Katie Gately honored her late mother with Loom's fresh perspectives on death and grief, the producer/sound designer's pregnancy inspired Fawn/Brute, an exploration of the complexities of bringing a new life into the world. Gately's third album doesn't sound much like most other music about parenthood, although the hazy impressions of Tirzah's Colourgrade might be a kindred, sleep-deprived spirit. It does, however, sound exactly like the work of Gately, falling somewhere in between the unbridled avant-pop of Color and the emotional intensity of Loom. "Cleave," which traces a friendship's breakup, feels like the next evolution of her debut album's mutant teen pop, with beats that hit like a slap in the face and stinging synths. The haunted feeling of Loom resurfaces when Gately delves into the anguish caused by pregnancy complications on "Meat," where a wailing theremin and breaking glass are among the cleverly layered sounds. Once again, Gately's expertise as a sound designer ensures that no matter how much is going on within each track -- and usually, it's quite a bit -- each sound gets its due. "Peeve" is one of the album's most spectacularly constructed tracks, with strafing tones, crisp vocals, braying saxophone and a wealth of percussion pieced together in a way that's both precise and suggests the moment before a street party turns into a riot. But even if Fawn/Brute could be the offspring of Gately's previous work, it's got a mind of its own. Aptly enough for an album inspired by pregnancy, its tracks are teeming with life and almost uncomfortably filled with sounds as they reach their ends. "Seed" begins the album with musical mitosis, growing quickly from scuttling beats and Gately's witchy vocals to audacious brass and the weighty beats that anchor and propel all of Fawn/Brute's experiments. Dedicated to Gately's daughter Quinn (who's also alluded to in the album's artwork), "Fawn" offers a charming, somewhat crazed sonic portrait, with squirming, squealing tones that sound newly born, a beat that's perfect for bouncing a baby on a knee, and vocals bursting with fierce, proud love. When Fawn/Brute moves from light to shadow and Gately draws from her own teenage rebellion and love for post-punk and industrial music, the results are just as powerful. Boasting a nasty bass line fashioned from recordings of rattled cardboard shoe boxes, "Brute" gives an apocalyptic cast to the tug of war between freedom and parental responsibility; on "Chaw," the hail of digital noise and swarming spoken word vocals take Gately's music to extremes that capture the drama of adolescence. Though moments like "Howl"'s collage of pure id -- cheering, moaning, barking, growling -- convey childlike glee, at times Fawn/Brute's impudent maximalism borders on overwhelming. Nevertheless, Gately's meditations on mothers and daughters, and bodies creating and betraying, are fascinating, and Fawn/Brute's expressions of the darker corners of childhood and motherhood might be even more revealing than more conventional musical memoirs.

© Heather Phares /TiVo