Blue Raspberry by Katy Kirby
Singer-songwriter Katy Kirby names her second album, Blue Raspberry, for a flavor made from food coloring and fantasy. We love it, though, from Japan (via Hi-Chew candy) to Shawano, WI (via Twig’s craft soda), and we not only don’t care about its artificiality; we also dig and maybe even crave its artificiality.
Kirby applies those feelings to love and lust: the title track and “Cubic Zirconia”—referring to the synthetic gemstone that looks a lot like a diamond to the average and naked eye—seem to be nicknames for a particularly vexing partner, but she digs and maybe even craves the vexing.
She responds to the ersatz with well-crafted naturalism. Austin Arnold, Logan Chung, and Alberto Sewald join Kirby (Chung and Sewald also co-produce the album), and everyone uses largely organic instrumentation, including piano, at times as stark as an empty rural chapel, in “Redemption Arc,” and bowed strings that stretch like a sated cat across “Alexandria.”
Kirby’s indie-pop side comes out especially well when she sings, and her ability to keep her melodicism away from melodrama recalls Sam Phillips, Regina Spektor, and a half-dozen other openly intelligent singer-songwriters. Yet the resemblances never become distractions, and Kirby distinguishes herself with a softness born of acoustic-folk sensitivity.
Fortunately, this isn’t wallflower sensitivity. In “Wait Listen,” for example, she murmurs, with strange sweetness, “So I turned off my location/Let her fuck me like you thought you did,” and, in “Salt Crystal,” she eye-rolls a croon of “Spare me your obsession with that incorruptibility.”
Combined with her facility with rock and pop—“Drop Dead” is as sprightly as a Sara Bareilles song, while “Redemption Arc” and “Table” open and close the album with grunge-adjacent fuzziness a la Belly—Kirby’s flinty eye and tender voice make Blue Raspberry as tart, sugary, and acidic as anything concocted in a lab by a would-be Wonka.
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Get Blue Raspberry on Amazon here.
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