ALBUM REVIEW: Katie Gately – Fawn/Brute

Houndstooth

Released 31.03.23

Katie Gately is the matron, the tunes are a self portrait of sorts of being a mother and existential observer of childhood burgeoning into adolescence, the harlequin is Quinn, her own newly born daughter as the beheld and the foreseen. A conflicted entanglement of roles for herself as the watcher and as the player/protagonist in a role at once mercurial in loving awe and also doubtful at her new responsibility as a mother.

The album as a whole is a curious mixture of electronic experimentation and enigmatic avant-pop that strays occasionally into a heady paranoiac maelstrom, only to drop back again into subtle introspection as demonstrated in the co-title tune Brute, and is roundly the encompassing emotional narrative.