Cate Kennan :: Shadows

Cate Kennan's second album, out on Kranky — the label that's home to Grouper, to Stars of the Lid, and the placement alone traces a horizon: music that prefers haze to outline, atmospheres left without a hard edge.

It opens with the gesture of someone driving in tent pegs before pitching camp. "The Lone West" lays out the coordinates of the territory we'll spend the next half hour in — place music in the most documentary sense, yet carrying the pulse, just under the skin, of an adolescence that has never quite stopped happening.

The voice's timbre, on the sung tracks, works like a device that takes a step back in time — not out of nostalgia but out of acoustics: it's the very grain of the sound that is years old. On the title track, an unfeigned lightness of song leans against the piano chords and stays there, frozen, like a photograph taken inside a dream and held still under a fingertip. A dream filter that fixes the image rather than blurring it.

The choices are poor in the noble sense of the word, and that's enough to carve out glimpses of melancholy that are rural, analogue, oneiric. At its peaks — "Reverie" above all — the dreamlike turns metaphysical, opening oblique refractions into the idea that time moves in single file rather than flowing. The micro pitch variations, the modulation effects that frame the melody, come from the same family as Candy Claws — that way of flaking pop apart into particles vibrating off-axis. It isn't the memory of a place: it's the doubt that the place was ever still.

When the album turns instrumental, the guitar marks out a desert territory with a Californian cut, over dream-pop beds that turn melancholy without wallowing in it; the synth strings hold everything up from underneath, as they do almost everywhere here — a texture that never quite detaches from the ground beneath it.

And then there's the point where I have to bring in Cranes, in their least guitar-driven incarnation: Alison Shaw, today, could well sing exactly like this. "Devil's Hour", in its lo-fi haze, evokes the moon shown as a wonder to someone who had never seen it before. The palette stays deliberately uniform — synth beds, reverb-thickened textures, guitar, keys, and an ethereal voice standing in for the insubstantial.

All of this, until the final track, "Calling" — the only one where the reverb disappears: the tone turns sharp, at times clipped; notes come and go, and it's no longer haze — it's gusting, intermittent wind, laying the ground bare. Even the singing pulls itself in, turns serious and measured, has to hold itself upright where there's no longer any path underfoot. The record closes walking, not dreaming.