Katy Kirby • Lutalo • King Courteen
Sun 08/06/23
7:00PM
All Ages
music
$16 ADV // $20 DOS
Show Lineup
Katy Kirby
(Nashville, TN)
Genre: Folk, Indie Rock
Katy Kirby is a songwriter and indie rock practitioner with an affinity for unspoken rules, misunderstanding, and boredom. She was born, raised, and homeschooled by two ex-cheerleaders in small-town Texas and started singing in church, amidst the pasteurized-pop choruses of evangelical worship, about which she shares acute perceptions.
Like many bible belt late-millennials, Katy grew up on a strict diet of this dependably uncool genre. She recalls, “In the mid-90s, the American evangelical church was making music of an extraordinarily digestible, almost unprecedentedly easy-listening kind, stylistically void and vaguely dubbed Christian Contemporary Music, or CCM. It was pop that wasn’t quite pop, determinedly hanging on to the openhearted melodies of a decade prior, straightforward so as to be easily memorable, and in a key that an average churchgoer could sing along to.”
Accordingly, Cool Dry Place finds her dismantling it. “I can hear myself negotiating with that worship-ish music, fighting that deeply internalized impulse to make things that are super pleasant or approachable.” She hasn’t fully overcome the itch to please, but to a listener’s benefit. Instead of eradicating the pop sensibilities of her past, she warps them, lacing sugary hooks with sneaky, virulent rage, twisting affectionate tones into matter-of-fact reproach, and planting seemingly serene melodies with sonic jabs. The fun is in the clash.
Take “Portals” for example, a song of country-traditional chords and gentle vocal delivery that might have easily materialized as a placid ballad. Rather, Katy drenched its soft core in metallic noise and oscillating string textures. You can imagine someone bussing glassware from a table nearby, while Katy sits you down at a booth and trusts you with notes on a pre-breakup, the first couple of minutes living in the last part of a relationship.
With the same masterful trickery, “Traffic!” juxtaposes sound and sentiment, a jittery combination of saturated pop and Rainforest Cafe’ faux-tropicalia projecting (arguably false) sympathy toward a character absorbed in his own self-inflicted misery. Though her chorus wails jubilant, Katy weaponizes its catchy gusts to criticize privilege: “Nobody has it better than you.”
Katy’s residual ties to church life are audial alone; spiritually, she has worked to detach. “Until a couple of years ago, I spent much of my time falling out of love with God. My life until then hadn’t just been participating in a church so much as completely, profoundly believing—youth group, sure, but also a few attempts to cast out demons. Learning how to think or see things outside of that very intense, clarified space was like rewiring my brain. I guess that if there’s one thing that unifies these songs, it’s that they’re figuring out what to do, or how to love, or who to rely on outside of that context.”
The nine tracks that make up Cool Dry Place are miscellaneous in subject (motherhood, late capitalism, disintegrating relationships,) but unified by the angle from which they’re told, from a person re-learning to process life with intense attention. Each song is a catalog of fragments, the number of segments in an orange or the cut of an obsessively-worn shirt, distilled into meditations on the bizarre and microscopic exchanges that make up modern life — a relationship splintering, an uncomfortable pause, an understanding finally found. These emotional dioramas are moderated by the angular storytelling that unites Gillian Welch and Phoebe Bridgers, a favor for the conventions of short fiction over confession.
Kirby readily admits that Cool Dry Place feels like a late-bloomer’s record. “These songs were written and recorded over an embarrassingly long period of time, by a few different versions of myself.” The album began in Nashville years ago. Kirby had moved there for college, changed majors five times, briefly dropped out, and finally graduated with a handful of songs, a circle of artistic allies, an amorphous collection of leftist beliefs, and an English degree. She flailed in the solo-artist archetype for a period of time before turning to friends capable of constructing a satisfying full length. Kirby, Alberto, Hunt, Logan, and Zook spent over a year carving out bits of spare time to record in bedroom studios, living rooms, and a now-demolished former residence of Keith Urban. Tracking was finally completed over Thanksgiving 2019 at Kirby’s childhood home outside of Austin.
As its title track flips the advisory on a package of Tylenol into a hymn to human need for protection and acceptance, Cool Dry Place asks a listener to embrace the precious and contradictory nature of being a person. Katy Kirby is an artist simultaneously tender and angry, vulnerable and protected, calculated and resigned.
Lutalo
(Vermont)
Genre: Folk-Rock, Soul
Lutalo — the project of Vermont-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Lutalo Jones — announces their signing to Winspear, the first-ever physical release of their debut EP, Once Now, Then Again, on vinyl out June 23rd, and releases new single “Familiar Face.” “Familiar Face” sees Jones atop electronic production, a fascinating continuation of Once Now, Then Again’s loose and wide-ranging framework. The original EP was deliberately fluid, and “Familiar Face” sees Jones continue to challenge the generic boundaries of folk, rock and soul. Like the rest of the tracks on Once Now, Then Again, every instrument heard on “Familiar Face” is played by Jones.
Of “Familiar Face,” Jones states: “I often like to consider the idea of shifting realities. I think it’s a fun and cool concept that makes living and the general everyday far more interesting. I know there are examples of certain cultures where it’s believed that this ability is possible and I guess for me this song is just channeling that and just diving headfirst into this form of thought.”
Lutalo grew up in Minnesota where life constantly took them back and forth across the Mississippi River, from their Minneapolis home to school in St. Paul, before they settled for a while in New York City. Introduced to playing music through the African drumming classes their parents took them to as a child, Lutalo was educated on the Black experience in America by their father’s love for hip-hop, jazz, and Bossanova – from MF Doom to A Tribe Called Quest. Today, Lutalo’s life is much different. They moved further east to live among the green peaks of Vermont, and took ownership of an area of land alongside family. With a shared intention of building a small community, their collective aim is to live life differently, and create something tangible that can be passed onto future generations. The to-and-fro energy of their early life is now replaced by something more steady, a desire to not get caught up in the intensity of the world.
It’s this overwhelming potency of modernity that ripples through Once Now, Then Again. Spanning both of Lutalo’s contrasting worlds, the songwriting began in the Twin Cities before being finished in the serene surroundings of Vermont, and both environments leave their mark on Lutalo’s rich and absorbing sound. “I tend to grapple with a lot of existential questioning, I wanted to capture what it feels like to be a twenty-something in this time period, reflecting on our relationship with technology, the Internet, relationships, world governments, housing…all while discovering what it means to be an adult and how our definition of what that looks like begins to shift,” Jones states. “The vision I have for this project is not so much genre-based as it is sound-based, and that sound is just a reflection of me. I didn’t want any boundaries because I’m not trying to replicate anything that’s come before, I only want to be adding to music in some way.”
Surrounding the release of Once Now, Then Again, Jones dazzled audiences through opening slots supporting The Weather Station and Novo Amor, with a slew of upcoming European dates alongside Big Thief. For now, Lutalo’s world consists of pastures and new beginnings, the search for brightness in spite of all the dark. Across Once Now, Then Again, the boldness of Lutalo’s visual rings clean and true. They might not have the answers, but they know the questions that need to be asked. They remain optimistic in attitude, steadfast in their belief that change can only happen when you believe in a better future.
King Courteen
(Milwaukee, WI)
Genre: Americana, Folk
Michael Gerlach builds beautiful things from nothing. As a woodworker, he transforms razed relics from Milwaukee’s industrial past into things like furniture and visual art. As King Courteen, the Riverwest singer-songwriter and pastor’s son constructs folk renderings known to captivate audiences using little more than the raw material of an acoustic guitar and his re-purposed choral background. -Milwaukee Record