Kate Stables has been making a few waves of late with her earthy and beguiling nu-folk, most notably on her previous album Bashed Out, which was produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner (who features as a player on several of the tracks here), purveyor of a seemingly impossibly glowing and warming old school sound that dispenses with snaps, crackles and pops to bring something pristine yet ancient to the table.

Stables and her core band (Rozi Plain, Jamie Whitby-Coles, Jesse D Vernon, and Neil Smith) this time enrolled the services of PJ Harvey’s musical partner John Parrish, to tease her often rudimentary songs into some kind of shape, but for the most part leaving their naturalness intact, and enabling Stables and band to intimately voice their emotions, thoughts and gently questioning ways. It’s been made much in the spirit of Bashed Out, but this time as more of a band effort. And once again, there’s plenty of beauty and wisdom within, with Stables drawing on African and British folklore, secrets, superstitions, and the magical process of creating art.

Musically, almost every song is built around Stables’ fingerpicking guitar/mandolin/banjo, with the band offering steady and gentle percussion, electric guitar courtesy of Vernon, some keys, bass, and smatterings of brass here and there.

Truth and storytelling are her prime arsenal of ‘weapons’, but wrapped in notions of how truth can change. Kate recently told Brightonsfinest: “This one talks a lot about stories and truth, and the interpretation of stories and truth, and how our interpretation and vision on things changes with time, and different experiences.”

“This is the natural order of things, change sets in,” she sings on the title track, a beautifully rhythmic and ever-so-slightly off-kilter song that details her abstract-yet-obvious thinking. In fact, it is based on an obscure American nursery rhyme and she liked the sound of it so much she decided to make a song about it. While ‘Riddled With Ticks’ is a gentle excursion into truth via metaphor: “Riddled with ticks, and squinting to see, we shook ourselves free… I know what is truth.” Nothing more simple than that, and yet so eloquently expressed, both lyrically and musically, Stables’ understated voice in particular both intimate and lucid, and warm in tone.

But as always with This Is The Kit, there are subtle nuances peppered throughout, an overiding gentle human spirit that seems utterly incapable of spite, malice or anger. As Kate also said about this album: “(It’s) about holding people accountable for their actions, but remembering that everyone is human and you need to help each other get through tangly times.” So, on ‘Easy on the Thieves’ she examines wrongdoing and responsibility but in a wholesome, friendly, gently admonishing kind of way: “We’ve been going easy on the thieves… what a proper pair of Charlies / Ducked by behind a tree and hoped that no would see… people want blood, and blood is war.“

Elsewhere, numerology and astronomy come into play on the swaying African rhythms of ‘All Written Out In Numbers’, about trying to make sense of the universe and our place in it. Interestingly, the song closes with a sound reminiscent of Nick Drake’s ‘Riverman’ thanks to the cascading electric guitar and synth-strings. Semi-African textures also permeate Moonshine Freeze, via the muted afro-beat style horns of ‘Empty No Teeth’ and ‘Two Pence Piece’, while the questioning spirit of ‘By My Demon Eye’ is built around African guitar rhythms and an African-style slightly chanted chorus.

Moonshine Freeze is bookended by two outstanding tracks, with the gentle summer breeze of opener ‘Bullet Proof’: “Swim, the tide is coming in, we spent too long watching / Bullet holes are rushing in, no use baling” and the wondrous album closer ‘Solid Grease’. The first half is like some kind of early 70s Neil Young style languid rocker, before it morphs into a semi-crazed piano-led finale, with Stables again working on notions of truth and perception: “They think they know they don’t know / We think we see we don’t see / Solid in grease, covered in.” With both songs, Stables sings of overcoming adversity, whilst dealing with a state of perpetual unease and questioning. It is to her credit that she is able to sing about these things via simple poetic lines that impart a tremendous human warmth, and strength of the human spirit. There is simply no need to panic or let anxiety take over. Let This Is The Kit look out for you instead.
Jeff Hemmings

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