A ramshackle energy propels Moonshine Freeze, the latest from Kate Stables’ folk project This Is the Kit. With rootsy arrangements of banjo, horns, and gentle percussion, it retains the intimacy of its well-loved predecessor, 2015’s Bashed Out. But it also offers the Paris-based songwriter’s loosest, wildest music to date, exploring a fruitful middle ground between the morbid and the profound. Through 11 songs that range from slow-burning mood pieces to riotous anthems, she maintains a sing-songy falsetto even as she assesses human nature in its most violent forms. “People want blood,” she repeats in “Easy on the Thieves,” “and blood is what they’ve got.”
The songs on Moonshine Freeze focus on characters awaiting hard consequences, sometimes gaining wisdom from the experience but more often lingering in dissonance. In the deceptively calm “Bullet Proof,” Stables coaches herself in the third-person (“There are things to learn here, Kate”) as her banjo flutters with the persistent trill of birdsong. She seems more interested, however, in pinpointing where things went wrong than explaining how they can get better, opening the album with a fatalistic sigh of relief. The title track is another highlight, with a buzzing, psychedelic groove. Backed by an army of bobbing horns, Stables meditates on impermanence, as her tightly layered vocals begin to drift apart. “This is the natural order of things,” she sings with a devilish chill, “Change sets in.”
Stables has evolved as a storyteller, writing in surprising, cryptic ways. Her words often seem boiled down to just bare essentials. The chorus of “Riddled With Ticks” alternately reassures (“I know what is true”) and threatens (“I will fight you”). In “Solid Grease,” she refines her process to just six words: “Things get said/Things get don’t.” With many of its songs assuming the form of chants or intonations, Moonshine Freeze feels proudly out of step with time. Stables largely eschews traditional song structures for a more intuitive logic, mirroring the in-between states her words invoke. The rousing ghost story of “Hotter Colder” jitters and jolts in sudden bursts, elevating the sparse track into the album’s boldest moment, even making room for a climactic saxophone solo.
Producer John Parish lends Moonshine Freeze the same starkness he’s developed through his work with PJ Harvey. In “Easy on the Thieves,” humdrum backing vocals add an ominous inevitability to Stables’ words, while “Two Pence Piece” rattles with soulful, gothic Americana. After producing Bashed Out, the National’s Aaron Dessner also helps deepen the texture, with guitar playing as natural and melodic as wind chimes. Even in its busiest moments, the album has a soothing effect. Its rough charms begin to feel like an acceptance of a world in disarray, refining its chaos into compact moments of beauty. “Probability wise, one of us has to die,” Stables tells a loved one in “All Written Out in Numbers,” “But by the same reckoning, it will be fine.” Moonshine Freeze explores all the tension between those two realizations, knowing that’s precisely where life happens.
