ALBUM REVIEW: Katie Gately – Loom

Houndstooth

Released: 14.02.20

The glistening darkness of Katie Gately’s second album is one of 2020’s early highlights. Throughout Loom, Gately thrillingly combines industrial electronic sound design with a strangely neoclassical sense of balanced melodies and counterpoint.

At the album’s heart is the gargantuan lead single Bracer, a linear epic which builds and builds around Gately’s looping, elegant vocal phrases, adding patient roars of reversed percussion, rumbles of saxophone and piano, and eventually blistering waves of distortion on top of a frantic martial pulse. Yet either side of this pulverising centrepiece lie necessary islands of windswept beauty – the first and last tracks, Ritual and Rest, are remarkable compositions consisting of billowing clouds of manipulated voice floating on top of cryptic, droning electronic foundations.