Music > Album Reviews

This Is The Kit - Moonshine Freeze

22/06/17

Through the medium of fourth studio album Moonshine Freeze, Kate Stables i.e. This is The Kit weaves the listener into a story and pulls them into her sea: ‘swim, the tide is coming in’. From the opening bars of Bulletproof I feel implored to hand myself over to it, Stables’ beautiful lyricism and hypnotic melodies reassure me of my (our) footing. She guides us through not only the cycles of her psyche but of the album itself: ‘as the change sets in, we are separate … some strings slackening, others giving in’. These cycles we are given access to extend beyond her album, with John Parish (PJ Harvey, M Ward), the producer of This is The Kit’s debut Krülle Bol, returning to work with her once more for this release. Stables describes the process of creating the album as one of stepping back and ‘seeing what forms and patterns arise’. A feeling of unfurling - there is plenty of room for things to emerge: ‘out went all the lights and up jumped all the spirits’. I am struck by Stables’ use of language to create feeling through sounds and patterns. She describes the power of a line or a melody to ‘send your brain into spirals’ - a line from Easy on the Thieves gives body to this thought for me: ‘people want blood/and blood is what/what they got’. The sound is much fuller than her previous albums, although the latter part of the album holds her dreamy bare-souled alt folk to the forefront and aligns her mysticism with the mundane. The album melds together the esoteric and the human narrative, allowing magic to permeate into the everyday.

8/10