Sometimes it isn’t about finding a prettier, more publicly pleasing, or more easily palatable sound; sometimes it’s about appreciating the beauty in more challenging sonic places. Just as life isn’t about finding the easiest path, constant compromise, conformity, and comfort zones, music can also be about the rewards to be found in navigating a more challenging creative pathway. Toronto’s AloneKitty, the sonic project of Michelle K, certainly understands that, and the latest album, Wide Awake, is built on the act of turning distortion, dissonance, and feedback into something strangely melodic, beguiling and, in its own way, beautiful.
Drawing on the shoegaze lineage of seminal bands such as My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Sonic Youth, and HUM, this is an album that keeps its feet set somewhere between the dreamscape and the impending apocalypse, between the mid-eighties and the end of the world.
‘Someone’ sets the scene perfectly with a relentless urge of treble-infused bass, a sound itself gradually subsumed by a searing sea of scuzzy guitars. The vocals are content to remain half-buried, half-heard, a voice-as-instrument presence, a texture as much as a talking point. ‘Nothing I Can Tell’ pushes further into industrial-gaze territory, its guitars like an electric tsunami that builds and broods without ever quite breaking.
‘Radio Signal Fading’ brings a little more pace and groove to the proceedings; it certainly isn’t a conventional three-minute pop song, but if you’re after a four-minute soundtrack for a night on a dystopian, razor-wired dancefloor, look no further. ‘You Can’t Even Tell’ sounds like dream-pop created on the event horizon of a sonic black hole, a song looking to outrun the inevitable, while ‘Disappointed (For the Last Time)’ takes things to their logical conclusion, gradually disappearing into a glorious art attack of drone and distortion, and white noise.
AloneKitty understands a fundamental truth: noise and beauty aren’t mutually exclusive; they can incrementally push into each other’s realm, and there is a sweet spot to be found in the liminal space between. And in that space, Wide Awake finds its perfect form.
