(2022) Kathryn Williams - Night Drives  


Review:
Since Kathryn Williams‘ 1999 debut, Dog Leap Stairs, the recording costs for which were apparently a meagre £80, she has released 12 full-length albums, an impressive anthology, and picked up a Mercury Prize nomination along the way for Little Black Numbers (2000). Williams is more than aware that such successes can be a meaningless measure if she is unable to develop her craft. Each album has been a stepping stone to push that further, a trend that continues with Night Drives, as she continues to explore ways to intrigue and find touchstones outside the commonplace. At times she seems to be coming from a different planet, “Human” opens with odd noises and continues to have bits of strangeness that pop up. The instrumental break is as unhinged as anything you might find in the rock world, yet it works as a way of establishing a woman who seems to be questioning her own humanity. While part of the credit may be assigned to Ed Harcourt as Williams’ producer for Night Drives, none of this would have happened if she hadn’t been comfortable with it. Williams continues to explore rather than simply settle into an old comfortable groove. Ostensibly a more conventional track, “Answer in the Dark” has its share of Beatlesque reference points, like string arrangements that harken back to the days of Magical Mystery Tour. The piece is also surprisingly modern at the same time. “When the shadow fell on the bathroom floor/ And I felt them fall like a monster’s cloak/ As the wheels came off, I didn’t not throw down/ You sat by my side and you held me close.” Raw emotions don’t change very much over time. Harcourt seems to specialize in ways to reframe things, providing a more current shading to the songs. “Radioactive” seems to focus on the bass and drums, yet washes of synth fill the frame momentarily. Williams’ voice has a detached quality in keeping with material that seems to make sense during the tensions of lockdown and our modern age. Throughout the disc, instruments fire at odd angles. Drums get fuzzed and dirty; pianos sound distant like they’ve been taken from other discs and thrown into positions that one would not expect to work. Yet they give Williams a contemporary feel, neither fake nor forced. Rather than suffering from the sheen of modernity, the songs feel at home in the context. Tallying up a profit and loss sheet seems a strange subject for a song; however, when it’s about the personal victories and defeats as “I Am Rich in All I’ve Lost,” it seems to make better sense. It’s not a simple process of checking off the right boxes. What have we learned along the way? Have the defeats made us stronger or shrunken us as people? Still searching, Kathryn Williams finds a way to humanize the machines she works with while still singing about things that matter. Night Drives reveals how much we stand to gain if we understand what we are really looking for and what we may lose while we look. — folkradio.co.uk


   


Track List:
01 - Human
02 - Answer in the Dark
03 - Chime Like a Bell
04 - Radioactive
05 - The Me for You
06 - Moon Karaoke
07 - Night Drive to the Lake
08 - Put the Needle On the Record
09 - Magnets
10 - The Brightest
11 - Starry Heavens
12 - I Am Rich in All That I've Lost


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk, singer-songwriter
Country: London, UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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