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Hugely under-sung second album by Los Angeles-based musician Cate Kennan which crept out a month or two ago with far too little fanfare. Not really sure why us and most everyone else for that matter missed Shadows on initial release, for it exists right in that sweet spot of mercurial half-light lunar pop and dreamzone experimentation that feels especially de rigeeur at the moment, channeling the submerged dissociative drift of mid-period Grouper, the psychedelic pop of Broadcast and, more recently, Dagmar Zuniga’s spectral folk mystery. If that is a busy lane right now, it’s also worth pointing out how adept Kennan is with both a melodic hook and her production flourishes (which, I’d contend, is the reason why she’s now on a label as discerning as Kranky). There’s a unique sadness to her delivery, too, songs caught under the weight of the day, charged with a slow-motion longing dredged from the ghostly pits of memory and dreamstate wandering. It’s undeniably compelling and convincing stuff from Kennan, an artist in clear control of her vision and understanding of her direction - tracks like ‘The Lone West’ and ‘Shadows’ are immediately enticing in their melodic construction, but it’s the faded tones of instrumentals like ‘Moonlight’ that truly convey her approach, halfway Badalementi eeriness, halfway April Magazine melan-phoria. And yet something else quite unknown left hanging in the purgatorial in-between. Very little to fault here, and surely not long before the world turns to take fuller notice of an undoubted new talent.
FFO: Dagmar Zuniga, Grouper, Broadcast, Angela Badalamenti, April Magazine
