If you were a tightly wound perfectionist who spent her formative years shuttling from award ceremony to award ceremony, conducting life as if it were graded by rubric, then you probably stumbled into adulthood craving freedom. The former jazz prodigy Kate Davis graduated from high school a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, scored a full-ride to the Manhattan School of Music, and performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. But she wasn’t satisfied, sneaking in time to experiment with more emotionally liberating indie rock. Now 28 years old, Davis has resurfaced with the clever and heartfelt debut, Trophy.
Trophy is a winking salute to adolescence, that chaotic period when your body is illogically proportioned and you’re not sure who you’re supposed to be. This turbulence has been fertile ground for sharp, empathetic indie rock for approximately forever. Davis has a good ear for it: she co-wrote Sharon Van Etten’s howling masterpiece “Seventeen,” and her own work basks in that wide-eyed nostalgia, radiating a sincerity that feels almost anachronistic in these bitter, irony-poisoned years. Unlike the pouty adolescents now seen on television, Davis’ teenagers aren’t sarcastic, lewd, or indifferent. A nervous boy spots a girl he likes at a party in “Dirty Teenager,” a droll Courtney Barnett-like track that finds poignancy in Miller Lites and scattered trash. Davis, cutting through swirling electric guitar and drums, sings “I just want to be your friend” so sweetly and earnestly that it‘s devastating.
Everything about Davis screams early 2010s — both the kindly, sincere messaging and the Pandora-approved singer-songwriter flavor of her music. Davis’s songs often start languorously, wading into gentle, lapping folk before plunging into noisier grunge-rock. She has a pleasant, lilting voice to listen to while resting your head against a window. But these slow-moving repetitions—a few plucked strings, a murmured confession—leave you hungry for grittier self-scrutiny. Romantic metaphors of open heart surgery and stars aligning can come off saccharine, as do melodramatic declarations to a lover to “meet me in the morning, indigo skyline twilight.”
The stakes often come into focus halfway through, paving the way for urgent, earnest questioning. After much toothless meandering on “Burning Accidents,” Davis growls at the thought of “wanting more”; the guitars swerve into a drone, and tender hopes of reconciliation splinter into visceral anguish at breaking apart. On “Did You Love Somebody,” Davis’ voice leaps and thins as she repeats the question. You can imagine someone avoiding her gaze, a little unnerved by the directness.
The emotional centerpiece of Trophy is “Daisy,” a wrenching song Davis wrote following the death of her father. Launching with the same guitar chug as Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run,” it charmingly captures the aimlessness and dread of growing up. Davis lists off virtues she doesn’t have: “Neither am I good nor pure, neither am I wise.” When she repeats “I keep fucking up,” she reminds us that we’re all little kids with lipstick smeared on our faces, masquerading as grown-ups.
