Singer-songwriter and composer, Kate Stables returns with a wondrous new This Is The Kit album, Careful of Your Keepers, that chronicles a world of mistakes and mishaps, cruel circumstances, and universe-driven surprises. It's a record that embraces the concept of outrospection – the idea that you get to know oneself by developing relationships and empathic thinking with others – and brings the Paris-based, UK born bandleader's signature ability to move swiftly between cryptic poetry to honest inquisition to the fore.
Guiding the ship through changing seas is producer Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), who deftly enhances the innate shared language that Stables has with her band, capturing beautiful instrumental performances while leaving the space required for her robust, silken voice to lead. The music here is daring and soft, cutting and warm, a wild feat of complexity and combined dispositions. Surviving change is a constant throughout this record and This is the Kit takes us to the front lines in “More Change,” where we celebrate the losing battle of fighting change with barbed dancing lyrics that whisk us from the mundane to the massive as a steady beat and delicate guitars wind in and out, down and around Stables words: “light bulb / life changing / found a friend…claw sanity back again.” The sonic brilliance always comes back to bite and the cascading melodies of “Stuck In A Room” plant the listener in the most familiar of recent quandaries, wanting to leave but being unable to. There are so many versions of “leaving” one might be attracted to in this disappointing modern age, and Stables works through them all. Conflict hits hard and with surprise but have the right people around you and you can escape by the skin of your teeth.