“I’ve been thinking a lot about truth and storytelling and the way that stories and truth change over time according to who’s telling them or who’s listening to them,” explains Kate Stables, the core around whom This Is The Kit has been built for the past ten years.
Now four albums in, the story of This Is The Kit is itself one of time and change and listeners. It has carried Stables from Winchester to Bristol to Paris, across tours and festivals and the admiration of critics and her peers, among them The National, Sharon van Etten, Chris Thile (of Nickel Creek, Punch Brothers, and now the host of A Prairie Home Companion), as well as Guy Garvey and much of BBC 6Music.
Stables once again enlisted John Parish (PJ Harvey, M. Ward, Perfume Genius) to produce; they had previously worked together on the band’s 2008 debut. Parish’s known brilliance for capturing a close-mic’ed vocal is felt here: Stables’ uniquely-textured voice is brought to the fore, and – following the tradition of exquisitely strange troubadors like Karen Dalton, Will Oldham, or Robert Wyatt – is simply arresting.
The themes and patterns that emerge in Moonshine Freezeencompass folklore and oracles, memory, language, secrets, superstition, lives out of sync, and “the strange accidental fortune-telling nature of the writing process”: ideas fed by the writing of Ursula Le Guin and Alan Bennett, the African folk stories collected by the ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey, by grey coastal days and the taste of blood and copper coins.
Somewhere between them, between the extraordinary closing piano swell of “Solid Grease” or the arresting banjo line of Empty No Teeth, and the buried rhythms of long ago, This Is The Kit create something quite mesmerizing, a sound seemingly unbound by time or place.
Kate Stables has long been an exceptional songwriter, but with Moonshine Freeze has comes the thrilling sensation of an artist truly finding her voice: as if these are the stories she has been waiting to tell, these the dark coves and shadowy glens she’s been longing to lead us through.
“This is the part of the song when we come together,” Adam Schatz’s voice rings out. “There’s no before. There’s no after. There’s only this.” Schatz leads Landlady, the Brooklyn five-piece whose 2014 Hometapes debut, Upright Behavior, boldly disrupts the notion of genre and reveals the soulful and continually-resonating work of Schatz and core band members Ian Chang, Ian McLellan Davis, Booker Stardrum, and Will Graefe, as well as a cast of NYC-based contributors gathered from Schatz’s tandem walks of life as a solo musician, improviser, organizer, collaborator, promoter, and writer. Compared to rock and roll juggernauts like The Band and Talking Heads, Landlady merge vast skill, a bend toward experimentation, and a proven belief that songs can be a true extension of the human experience. The result is timeless and charted by their recorded works and transformative live shows — both critically-acclaimed and ever-evolving. The next era was revealed this summer: Heat, a new EP, was released for free to fans worldwide and will be exclusively available on cassette tape on their US tour with passionate peers Son Lux and Buke and Gase.