This Is the Kit wasn’t the most popular name to appear on Folk Off, the 2006 state-of-freak-folk compilation that pitted US artists (Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective) against their UK counterparts (Vashti Bunyan, Tunng). At the time Kit captain Kate Stables hadn’t even released a debut single, let alone a full album, but that made her an ideal inclusion: a less established artist who could benefit from proximity to more popular names while demonstrating the depth and breadth of the scene. Built around a deftly picked guitar theme and showcasing her earthy vocals, "2 Wooden Spoons" held its own against Stables’ contemporaries. But nearly a decade later—when folk has fully embedded itself in the indie mainstream such that we’ve dropped the "freak" appendage altogether—the song carries very few of the signifiers that might anchor it to that long-past trend.
Stables wears her eccentricities comfortably, whether she's bending an old word into new shapes or displaying a curious sense of professional timing. Sunday Best, the label that released Folk Off, quickly issued her debut 7'', with a full-length debut, Krulle Bol, released a year later. Wriggle Out the Restless followed in 2010, and the folksy austerity of her music caught the ear of Aaron Dessner, who not only signed her to his Brassland label but secured an opening slot for This Is the Kit when the National played New York in 2011. Four years later, Stables is releasing her third album, Bashed Out, which Dessner inevitably produced. This is Slow Music: patiently and carefully handcrafted, as though the process were just as important as the result, and released on her own whim rather than by industry dictate.
These new songs don’t sound terribly different from Stables’ first recordings nearly a decade ago, but the music is bolder and more purposeful, with a broader, richer palette of sounds. Dessner works in a minimalist vein, placing a handful of instruments at various levels in the mix but never locking them into place. A barely audible bassline rocks softly against Stables’ plaintive guitar theme on opener "Misunderstanding". "Silver John" blossoms into a swell of synths (courtesy of Thomas Bartlett a.k.a. Doveman) and builds to a chorus of odd siren vocal calls. There’s a parallax quality to the music, an immersive sense of depth that makes the songs sound larger with each listen.
Even as he expands her range and emphasizes her idiosyncrasies, Dessner wisely stays out of Stables’ way, and she emerges easily as the dominant force on Bashed Out. Her guitar work is nimble but not fussy, and she conjures a sense of nameless menace on closer "Cold and Got Colder". On "Spores All Settling" her banjo playing is almost pointedly rudimentary, emphasizing the present moment rather than the perfect performance. She’s a complex and compelling personality, spiking her folksy whimsy (there’s a song about the smell of mushrooms) with shots of prickly wisdom. "And so the outside, it bashes us in, bashes us about a bit," she sings on the title track, one of the album’s weightiest moments.
For Stables, creating music—or making art of any kind—means bashing right back at life, matching it blow for blow. Yet, this resilient album is less concerned with enduring immense tribulations than it is with enjoying life’s simple pleasures. Stables’ concerns are microcosmically personal, trading in minute details and small observations that provide immense contentment. "Vitamins" is an ode to fresh greens, while "Nits" describes sheep on a hillside as "happy little fatties." Both songs land just this side of unbearably precious, but Stables doesn’t seem to care how such moments strike the listener. After almost a decade presenting herself as This Is the Kit, she has learned to root her music firmly in her own quirks rather than in the demands of any particular genre or trend.
