Katy Kirby is a songwriter and indie rock practitioner with an affinity for unspoken rules, misunderstanding, and boredom. She was born, raised, and homeschooled by two ex-cheerleaders in small-town Texas and started singing in church, amidst the pasteurized-pop choruses of evangelical worship, about which she shares acute perceptions.
Like many bible belt late-millennials, Katy grew up on a strict diet of this dependably uncool genre. She recalls, “In the mid-90s, the American evangelical church was making music of an extraordinarily digestible, almost unprecedentedly easy-listening kind, stylistically void and vaguely dubbed Christian Contemporary Music, or CCM. It was pop that wasn’t quite pop, determinedly hanging on to the openhearted melodies of a decade prior, straightforward so as to be easily memorable, and in a key that an average churchgoer could sing along to.”
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“I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane” – Allegra Krieger’s fourth record and her first with Double Double Whammy – is her most mature and alluring work yet. It contains all the signatures of her best lyricism: delicate and precise phrasings, moments that flicker between beauty and banality, meaning that forms through the accretion of observations, memories, and unexpected adages. This is an album that is at once post-theistic and devoted to a relationship with the divine, each song blinking in and out of “the fragile plane,” a place Krieger describes as “a middle ground in the universe,” both abstract and peaceful, where time, bodies, and names don’t exist.
Krieger’s peripateticism has clearly informed her songwriting. She spent her childhood on the blistering beaches and cold Catholic pews of northern Florida. Before settling in Chinatown, she drifted through suburban Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland cleaning motel rooms, planting trees, tending bars, and picking olives. In “Terribly Free”, she walks with the rats in Manhattan; in “I Wanted to Be” she bites into a ripe orange somewhere in the south; in “Nothing in This World Ever Stays Still” she stands outside of a sports bar in LA watching coastal smoke rise from the hills; later, she describes being “moved by whatever’s
moving us.”
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Both born in Dallas, Texas in 1997 to respective Smith families, singer-songwriter Jonah Paul Smith and guitarist Julian Paint Smith met in elementary school. An organic orange juice debacle at Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts’ cafeteria cemented their partnership. In 2016, the two enrolled at The New School and moved to New York City. They formed a band and released the EP “Boring the Camera” under the name Pueblo in 2017. Through their collegiate years, the band developed an idiosyncratic folk-rock sound, combining elements of Elliott Smith’s baroque-pop songcraft and Aimee Mann’s irreverent adult contemporary. Attending Jazz Studies and English Literature courses by day, the band played shows across NYC, headlining venues like Elsewhere and Baby’s All Right.
In April 2022, Closebye released their debut album, “Lucid News.” The 9-song collection anxiously processes time’s relentless passage, charting a chronology of reverie and reconciliation, estrangement and acceptance, sadness and self-forgiveness. The record’s sessions took place in Bearsville, NY with Producer Tim Bright (Lisa Loeb, Kate Davis). Upon the album’s release, the band expanded to become a solidified lineup of 5, adding multi-instrumentalist Ian Salazar, bassist Margaux Bouchegnies, and drummer Simon Clinton. The resulting live show is a testament to the quintet’s ripening sound – sweet, sharp and pithy, like the Texas oranges upon which their destiny is staked.
