Sophisticated Folk, intellectual pop, from Katherine Priddy.
Katherine Priddy’s new album, her third, is a collection of strong songs that each, in their own ways, examine what it means to be a human – not just a person alive in this first half of the 21st century, but eternal verities. Some of them, it has to be acknowledged, not wonderful verities but the truth isn’t always pretty – yet even when Priddy is digging into less palatable human behaviours, she has a message that things can, and should change, and it’d probably be wise for anyone alive in the first half of the 21st century to take note. A song such as Atlas offers nothing but compassion for someone over-embracing a traditional male role: “silence falls down like a curtain/pools around your shoulders / wear it like a shroud / then buckle/bent when no one’s watching / momentary weakness all that you’re allowed“. It’s mix of finger-picked guitar and an almost pop sensibility sets a pattern for the album’s production – sonically beautiful, but stepping one pace back from being overproduced to allow the joy that is Katherine Priddy’s vocals to shine through. There’s a more sombre feel to I’m Always Willing, a duet with Richard Walters, which pulls against the weight of weariness to offer a continuing loving pledge to try “I’m not always able, but I’m willing“.
These songs, Priddy has said, represent her thoughts on transitioning from her twenties and into her thirties – a significant life step, of course, but there’s also an opportunity to ponder the outside forces that impinge on her place in the world. Madeline is one such, a keening lament against everyday misogyny, that perpetually seeks to constrain whether it be the music festival which doesn’t need too many female singer-songwriters – “Madeline by mistake or design they made you feel the limelight can’t be yours as well as mine / And it’s an art how they keep our names apart but stick us on a bill with twenty men who play guitar” or the wider music industry which incessantly demands a kind of conformity leaving those it seeks to control “scared to lose the apples if we dare upset the cart.” The album’s opening song, the folk-electronica Matches, puts the patriarchy under notice that change is coming – stridently dissecting the motives behind the historical burning of witches as just one of the more blatant mechanisms of control, and adds the warning that things have changed, and are not changing back: “don’t they know we have matches too?”
Back in 2018, Richard Thompson described Katherine Priddy’s debut EP as the best thing he’d heard all year – and gave her support slot on his tour on the back of it. On These Frightening Machines, Priddy has continued to expand her sound, taking it beyond the more recognisably folk-influenced singer-songwriter into a complex world where folk rubs against electronica, and then sensually sways, as it does on Hurricane, to a Latin rhythm, before shining out an unabashed pop-light as on Sirius. It’s a tribute to Priddy and her producer, Rob Ellis, that these disparate strands of music weft and weave together to make a whole cloth of astonishing strength and beauty.
