THIS Is The Kit is Katie Stables and this is her fourth album in ten years. Her journey has taken her from Winchester to Bristol to Paris, her home for a decade now, although she worked on Moonshine Freeze in Bristol with "three of my favourite musicians", Rozi Plain, Jamie Whitby-Coles, Neil Smith and Jesse D Vernon, which makes four of course.
Crucially too, she asked Bristol luminary John Parish to produce the album after his sublime impact on P J Harvey, M Ward and Perfume Genius's records, not to forget her own debut, Krulle Bol. Aaron Dessner, from The National, lends his grace to six tracks too.
The songs were written by Stables before the recording sessions, the musicians then wrapping them in beguiling, mesmerising soundscapes to compliment her reflections on folklore, memory, secrets, superstitions and lives out of kilter.
She is a wondrous, illuminating storyteller, a singer of beauty yet exotic strangeness too, at home in the light and the shadows. Better, frankly, than the 2017 Laura Marling.
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