After three successful albums with MUNA, lead singer Katie Gavin steps out solo with What a Relief. The album highlights Gavin's distinctive vocals and lyricism in a contemporary update of Lilith-core folk music, but the entire project feels intimidated by its own potential.Gavin is right at home in the album's genre pastiche, reining in her piercing belt to traverse feathery lightness and gravelly depths with ease. Pop music so often focuses on singers who will push the limits of their range, but it's refreshing to hear an artist explore the intricacies of her instrument without that strain. Gavin luxuriates in playing with the texture and tone of her voice to great effect tapping into strains of Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple and Tracy Chapman, sometimes all in one song, while still sounding distinctly herself.An equally competent songwriter, Gavin is a gifted storyteller with an excellent economy of language. This serves her well as What a Relief excavates a bevy of heavy yet familiar themes — womanhood, generational trauma, grief, heartbreak, self-actualization. While honouring the songwriting traditions of the late '90s and early aughts soft rock, Gavin presents a unique and compelling point of view. Contemporary folk-pop songwriters can sometimes struggle to find new ways to sing about age-old themes, but Gavin wields her own writing like a knife, cutting straight to the heart with incisive, bare-faced truths.Where What a Relief falters is in its homogeneity. The first half is fairly strong, buoyed by the lead singles "Aftertaste" and "Casual Drug Use," sunshine-filled folk-pop with casually devastating lyrics that wouldn't be out of place on a MUNA record. The Mitski-featuring "As Good as It Gets" is a rueful, dual-perspective meditation on settling in a relationship. The most experimental track, "Sanitized," is a slinking, discordant oddity that feels both seductive and fascinatingly unsettling. However, the album starts to drag in its second half. The songs' structures are basic, predictable and nearly identical from track to track. While the production updates conventional folk and country arrangements with interesting pop distortions, the style and tone of the songs are relatively constant, and the lack of variation results in a flat listening experience. Many of the tracks feel as though they've been cut short, with all the potential of the first verse left hanging after the last chorus.Gavin is a talented vocalist and songwriter, but What a Relief doesn't give her the time or support to showcase her abilities. At its best, the album delivers contemporary counterparts to feminist folk classics, but the good moments are often rushed through for seemingly no purpose. The production has all the makings of a truly original sound, but it doesn't get a chance to fully unfurl within the confines of the project. Gavin seems afraid to take up space on the album, like she's rushing through a set she's being signalled to wrap up.
Wavelength
Rate and discover music with friends
