Katie Gately’s second album wasn’t supposed to sound like this. The Los Angeles artist had nearly finished an entirely different record, with a different working title, but after receiving the devastating news that her mother had been diagnosed with a rare form of terminal cancer, Gately left that album behind.
For a while, she left her life in L.A. behind too, moving back to her family home in Brooklyn to help care for her mother. Wracked with grief and suffering from insomnia as she watched her mom slowly slip away, Gately began work on a new album, one centered around “Bracer,” a song that her mother had identified as a favorite.
Gately’s mother passed away in 2018, and Loom was finished in the months that followed. It’s an album about death, loss, and saying goodbye; it’s also the finest thing that Gately has ever done. The new LP takes a dramatic turn away from Color, her impressive 2016 full-length debut for Tri Angle. That record was a ball of kinetic energy, a collection of brightly shaded, hyperactive pop flirtations that reflected her background as a sound designer. Rapidly cycling through various moods, samples, effects, and sound palettes, Color at times sounded like Gately doing her best to express 10 different ideas simultaneously, but there was something inviting about its mania.
Loom is noticeably more focused, although it’s not without its twists and turns. Sound design still plays a major role; the LP features samples—many of them heavily manipulated—of earthquakes, screaming peacocks, howling wolves, a car crash, shaking pill bottles, a coffin closing, a shovel digging, and more. There’s even audio from her parents’ wedding. Gately’s compositional approach is just as idiosyncratic. “Bracer,” the album’s centerpiece, clocks in at more than 10 minutes and is something of a rollercoaster, opening with little more than her solemn voice and ending with a towering, grief-stricken crescendo of soaring synths and hammering percussion. Along the way, it also winds through a passage of what sounds like haunted carnival music and another movement that evokes the brooding piano lounge of bands like Black Heart Procession.
This could make for a disjointed listen, but “Bracer” (like Loom in general) has the advantage of following a very specific vision. Where Color was fueled by a playfully experimental spirit—listening to the album, it’s easy to imagine her repeatedly asking, “What would happen if I tried this?"—Loom puts her personal narrative front and center. Her production chops and intense attention to detail are still there, but they’re no longer ends in themselves; instead, they act in service of both the music’s heavy emotional core and Gately’s vocals, which have become more prominent in the mix.
It’s easy to draw comparisons between Gately and contemporaries like Zola Jesus and Holly Herndon, but on Loom her voice sounds a lot more like Kate Bush or PJ Harvey. She’s not a trained singer, but there’s a dark, bedazzling quality to her vocals; during the closing passage of “Waltz,” Gately almost seems to be channeling the famous “Song of the Witches” from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. A similar sort of necromancer vibe emanates from the swirling chorus of “Tower,” a pomp-filled song written from the perspective of her mother’s cancer medicine. Elsewhere, Gately’s voice takes on a reverent, almost religious timbre, most prominently on “Allay” and “Flow,” both of which weave her vocals into rich, soaring choirs.
Sacred music was a familiar part of Gately’s upbringing. Her mother was a former nun, and though she’d left her calling (and religion in general) after meeting Gately’s father and growing disillusioned with the Catholic church, she nonetheless filled their household with Gregorian chants and other spiritual sounds. Some of that aesthetic has clearly seeped into Loom, which contains numerous nods to religion (and her mother’s former life). Interludes “Ritual,” “Rite,” and “Rest” form a sort of devotional triptych, while “Bracer” gets a bit more literal with refrains like, “Sin sin sin sin sin for the win” and “Take my sin and shove it into yours."
Gately has often commented on her struggles with depression and anxiety, but on Loom she sounds confident and self-assured. Her mother is all over the album, but Gately herself is the main character here, and the journey she takes is riveting. It’s her pain, her sorrow, and her memories—both good and bad—that fuel the record, and though the experience of her mother’s passing must have been harrowing, death does have a way of underlining what’s really important. Loom feels like the first time that Gateley’s technical prowess and songwriting are fully on the same page. The album may be rooted in loss, but Loom’s success lies in the clarity of vision that she has found.
Buy: Rough Trade
