This Is The Kit

Moonshine Freeze

ROUGH TRADE

8/10

The West Country wanderer’s fourth album may be her best yet. By Graeme Thomson

ONE of the most immediate tracks on This Is The Kit’s fourth album, “By My Demon Eye” turns out to be a sweet deceiver. With its rolling melody, rippling highlife guitar line and sing-song refrain – inspired by an African folk tale, The Rabbit And The Tortoise – it has the naïve charm of a children’s playground chant. That is, until we discover that the chorus translates as: “Boil, boil, water boil/Let the liars boil!” 

Such incongruity cuts to the heart of This Is The Kit. A vehicle for the songs of Kate Stables, a displaced Bristolian now residing in Paris, they are much admired by Guy Garvey, The National and Sharon Van Etten, and it’s easy to hear why. Their music is a slinky, slippery thing, forever shifting between light and dark, prettiness and abrasion, innocence and lowering psychodrama – often during the same song.

Though Stables’ roots lie in the West Country’s indie-folk scene, strumming a banjo in sensible sweaters, these days her music is a full-bodied beast, rich and rhythmic. Points of reference range from Sufjan Stevens to Can, Tony Allen to PJ Harvey. The one overt folk signifier is her voice. Coolly self-contained and very English, comparisons with Sandy Denny are, for once, far from fanciful.