This Is The Kit – ‘Careful Of Your Keepers’ album review: slipping into an entrancing escape
The brainchild of Paris-based bandleader Kate Stables, This Is The Kit, energised fans earlier this year with the announcement of their forthcoming studio album, Careful of Your Keepers. The album, deftly produced by Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, is finally upon us. The previewing singles, ‘Inside Out’, ‘More Change’ and ‘Stuck In A Room’, promised great things, so let’s see how watertight the rest of the ship is.
The album opens on a bold and sentimental note with the characteristically introspective ‘Goodbye Bite’. A fragmented beat is matched with sporadic guitar intrusions that allow Stables’ soft vocals to surf forth. Immediately, Rhys’ production prowess shines through, adding warmth to the lyrics: “Open your eyes and smile.”
The lead single, ‘Inside Outside’, follows to inject some pace into proceedings with a prevailing drum beat and a more assertive reprise of the brass arrangements that adorned the opening track, courtesy of Jesse Vernon. A similar pattern evolves through the album with a broad range of instruments neither overstepping nor toeing the line.
A fingerstyle progression performed either on a banjo or ukulele forms the structure of ‘Take You To Sleep’, with enhancing electric guitar and brass textures shaping the climax. This upbeat, optimistic presence is grounded at the album’s midriff by the slow, brooding beauty, ‘This Is When The Sky Gets Big’. The track tempts the mind’s eye with vivid imagery taking us to a hippie campfire setting with the titular incantation at its close.
The repulsion encountered when reading the title ‘Scabby Head and Legs’ mustn’t be heeded, for what it holds musically is one of the album’s vibrant highlights. Jamie Whitby-Coles’ masterful drumming is met with Neil Smith’s intricate, cascading guitar lines. Meanwhile, Stables somehow generates intensity with imagery indicative of a tranquil garden before using a tree’s roots, unrolled dice and treasure chests for suggestive metaphors.
The quiet-loud-quiet composition of ‘Careful of Your Keepers’ allows Rozi Plain’s bass work to permeate to the surface before keys and guitars give the track intermittent voluminous swagger.
The single ‘Stuck In A Room’ is positioned well as the penultimate track on the album. Clocking in at two minutes and 11 seconds, it’s the record’s shortest offering but undoubtedly one of its highlights thanks to a rapturous vocal display from Stables.
The album finally bows out to its longest track, ‘Dibs’, which swells with rippling familiar guitar melodies and piano chords toward a final crescendo for which Rhys implants some dramatic synth effects. “Since the beginning of time and out of time,” Stables sings for a farewell refrain.
This Is The Kit have returned with a real beauty in Careful Of Your Keepers. The music flows seamlessly throughout the album, with Stables’ enigmatic lyrics painting vivid imagery unique to the beholder. The ethereal, imaginative lyrics are intensified by virtuosic instrumental and productional command, leaving only one very minor criticism. Some of the tracks are somewhat similar to one another, leaving a full album with variety befitting of an EP. The music will likely put you in an indie trance, however, so any dramatic tonal or stylistic transitions might’ve been a jarring shock to the system anyway.
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