The valences of “pop” and “weird” have become increasingly compatible in the last half a decade—Miley Cyrus eschewed her post-“Hannah Montana” trend-hopping for an album co-written by Wayne Coyne, PC Music traded in their outsider art status for an imprint deal with Columbia, and member Danny L Harle released a track featuring vocals by Carly Rae Jepsen. But the mainstream has always cherry-picked from the underground and alternative artists have always had pop proclivities. (Remember The Whitey Album, Sonic Youth’s tribute to Madonna?) Nothing about this overlap is particularly shocking or rebellious anymore—from albums to playlists and beyond, the monoculture always finds a way, and everyone will someday inspire Kanye West.
Sound designer and producer-turned-musician Katie Gately falls into the Avant-Garde Goes Pop category. She works with found sounds and meshes those odd samples with pristine vocals to create more than just tokens of her findings. Her debut full-length Color, out on premiere outré label Tri Angle Records, is certainly exploratory pop but adheres to certain sounds of the mainstream at its core. Gately’s work may not be mistakable with Katy Perry’s, but what sets her apart from the avant-pop pack is that her constructions have the sublime polish of Top 40. Her songs are infectious the way pop should be but without perfunctory lyrics, and they stick to you because what Gately creates ends up sounding just so very big.
Gately benefits from sound design know-how from her film production MFA studies at USC and her professional experience. This skill set benefits the intricacies of her beat constructions—harmonies built on tweaked vocal samples to bolster her own voice (“Sift”); cello and garbage-can percussion eloquently melding to make something reminiscent of grunge, but still reflective of current electronic trends at its core (“Frisk”). But Gately’s work is more in line with Lady Gaga’s theater-kid tendencies than, say, Grimes. Her work is likely to be compared to Holly Herndon and Björk, particularly because of the Haxan Cloak’s involvement with Vulnicura, but its forebear is really Madonna’s Ray of Light (save its sugarcoated title track). That album may not sound particularly revolutionary in 2016, but in 1998, the meshing of ambient, trance and electronica for a massive mainstream audience has helped pave the path for the last 20 years of pop music. Gately, working alone, somehow takes the dark tones of that album, bolds the colors and makes it sound even more expensive.
It’s both something old and something new for Tri Angle. Despite having previously housed artists like How to Dress Well and AlunaGeorge, the label’s name tends to evoke abrasiveness —the deconstructed club destruction of Rabit; Lotic’s silvery violence or the blistering funeral procession led by the Haxan Cloak. Its recent signees, R&B-classical hybridist serpentwithfeet alongside Gately, signal a push away from the acerbic that is still able to straddle the label’s interest in anxiety.
This is what makes Color so remarkable. It boasts the sort of large-scale electronic compositions that can often feel monolithically lonely, and she does it all by herself. And yet the album sounds and feels collaborative, as if it were the product of multiple viewpoints and inputs. It seethes with so many sounds and ideas that it sounds like a conversation, rather than a monologue.
You hear that particularly on tracks like “Sift” and the album’s lead single “Tuck,” as it twists through global influences—some of which are maybe a little bit questionably appropriative, similarly to Madonna’s exploration of celebrity-style Buddhism—that invoke the presence of others. Sometimes those shifts don't always land; “Sire” climaxes with too much distortion, and “Rive” utilizes an orchestra that sounds more demented than inventive.
Tri Angle releases tend to point toward the future, and with Gately’s album, it means that lo-fi pop is bounding for more gloss. But the ultimate takeaway from Color is not just another unconventional vision of what’s to come, it’s circling back to the label’s origins. Despite the gloom or brutality of Roly Porter or Evian Christ, it still has a Lindsay Lohan tribute album in its history. Granted, that mixtape, 2010’s Let Me Shine for You, is comprised of erstwhile witch-house covers and remixes by the likes of Laurel Halo and Oneohtrix Point Never, but it portended so much of the composite dance music to come. Gately’s effort is not just a blockbuster of a debut, it is the next stage in Tri Angle’s obsession with pop music as an influence—and the first that is primed to have the world pop world return the favor.
