Last year, Katy B was widely credited for bringing vocal finesse and feminine pop appeal to an increasingly aggro dubstep-crossover arena. She dropped a fantastic Benga-backed debut single, "Katy on a Mission", that vocally wrung out both elation and longing over his abrasive, buzzing stutter-step. And she kept that streak going with a couple of guest spots on Magnetic Man's self-titled record: The eerie come-on "Crossover" and the ecstatic jungle throwback "Perfect Stranger" were album highlights that proved her voice could breach the barrier of heavy-duty bass and plant its feet firmly atop it. Two UK top 5 hits later-- "Katy on a Mission" and the Ms. Dynamite collaboration "Lights On"-- and members of the English music press started to peg her as the next singer to bring crossover legitimacy to bass music.
Turns out that'd be selling her a bit short. After pairing up with Rinse FM's tastemaker station head Geeneus and co-producer Zinc, Katy B has used On a Mission as a chance to posit herself as a genre-spanning pop singer who isn't tied down to a single thing, no matter how well it suits her. It's a move that makes a lot of sense, since versatility is the key to a good dance album-- let the voice establish itself, and the niche will either find itself or get broadened in the process. "Katy on a Mission", "Lights On", and "Perfect Stranger" reappear here in radio-edit lengths, and these three tracks help define her as someone who can play off dubstep and funky basslines with a tone that drips with cool defiance, stings with melancholy, and still grabs at you when it's being reduced to a skeletal echo. But there's enough stylistic extension here that Katy finds a way to transcend enough signifiers to call herself pop above anything else.
The big standout here is "Broken Record", a four-on-the-floor thump with electro underpinnings and a breakdown that perks up longtime dance fans with a judiciously dropped "Amen" break. It's one of those club-tested/radio-ready tracks that sounds good anywhere, not out of focus-grouped button-pushing but the way Katy sells it: coyly yearning and melodically sweet on the verse, intense and swooping on the chorus, wracked with ambiguity throughout. And then she finds another gear when the song finally shifts into the titular hook near the end-- the way she rolls her delivery of the line "like-a-bro-ken rec-ooooord" is the stuff that song-length buildups were made for. And there's more of that going around on the other new tracks, laid out in a number of different modes-- the trapped yet defiant punchback of opener "Power on Me", the sour resentment of "Why You Always Here", the slyly perilous seduction that drives "Witches Brew". It's a repertoire that gives her the appeal of a 1990s rave diva with contemporary pop-R&B refinement, minus the Auto-Tune.
That alone would make her another noticeably talented if semi-anonymous vocalist. But she also provides a breather from pop's current fascination with vacant navel-gazing. It's not just the nods to decades-old house and jungle that provide a perspective on dance-music culture that predates the tyranny of the David Guetta era-- though Geeneus and Zinc get all the credit in the world for following up Katy's early breakthroughs with a first-rate collection of beats that reunite the disparate splinters of bass music culture past and present. What puts On a Mission over the top is Katy's way of expressing herself with emotions that extend past "wooo, druuunk" into more nuanced and detailed relationships with booming systems and the people who flock to them. As danceable as these tracks can be, the undercurrents of nuanced frustration and uncertainty in Katy's tone-- especially in the surrender of "Power on Me" and the torn-up estrangement of "Go Away"-- amplify the tricky dynamics of relationships and hook-ups to rarefied levels, creating a tension to the music that makes epics out of dissatisfaction. And when she withdraws just a bit for one of the more introspective cuts, a haunting mid-tempo meditation on love and identity called "Disappear", her caught-up bewilderment says softly and resonantly what lesser singers couldn't accomplish with overblown histrionics. A genre-bound narrative might still see Katy B slotted into a narrow role that can't quite contain her, but her voice is doing its best to prove otherwise.
