Review Summary: Not just another episode of tenderness
Katy Kirby's style of indie-folk has always—meaning since her 2021 debut—felt understated. There, on that album, Kirby's sometimes sad, more often fun, but always, always confident song-writing lent the music a breeziness that excused, maybe even justified a shallow listen. In most ways, that's a compliment:
Cool Dry Place is "easy listening", but only in the sense that Kirby's cool, authoritative writing and performance make it such an easy album to listen to. They give the illusion of a perfect sphere, smooth and shiny but, after a bit of handling, just a little bit boring. There's this mad climax on the album's penultimate song, its title-track, that jolts you back awake and asks you to reconsider, to observe the sphere more thoughtfully. But it isn't enough to convince you—wasn't enough to convince me—to pay more attention to the sphere's layers, its contours, its multivalent textures. Much of which, to break apart from this poorly formed metaphor, come in the form of Kirby's lyrics, one of her greatest strengths.
In a lot of ways,
Blue Raspberry is much the same. Kirby's confidence as an artist—the way this manifests in the easiness, the breeziness of her music—has only grown. But whereas on
Cool Dry Place this confidence resulted in music that for the most part felt no desire to prove itself, to exist outside its already well-defined bounds,
Blue Raspberry sees some extremely slight but thoughtful experimentation from Kirby. A playfulness that, on the one hand, gives greater depth to Kirby's music—or otherwise make that depth more obvious to the shallow listener—but also, on the other, reemphasises to you—to me—just how good, how delicate, how thoughtful a songwriter Kirby really is at her core.
Lead single 'Cubic Zirconia' is a love song whose short-lived piano strikes invoke Regina Spektor. The song rushes quick back into what might be considered typical for Kirby—fun, nimble folk-rock, a fast-building, not moreish but no doubt (ful)filling climax—but it's a worthy regression. At the other end of things, 'Hand to Hand'—its muted guitars, its dirty percussive bass hits, its chime-like then alien whirrs—invokes a one-woman creek shanty, and your guess is as good as mine. All I know is it fucking rules, and the way the instrumental drops out towards the song's backend—presumably to bring us towards a climax, only to return unchanged moments later as though nothing happened—is as frustrating as it is smug and satisfied. What resolution? What's there to resolve? The best of the lot might be tender piano-driven opener 'Redemption Arc', which despite its softness arrests all the diners at the oddly capacious, smoke-filled restaurant. Or perhaps 'Wait Listen', ambling lethargic Heffalump of a song whose narrative is as heartbreaking as it is impressive. Closer 'Table', likewise, has a shot here, but the point, I'm sure, has been gotten. What's there to resolve?
