Kee Avil – Spine

Constellation

Adventurous Canadian sound sculptor and songwriter Kee Avil sounds as though she is disconcertingly whispering in your ear on her latest Constellation release, such is the intimate production.

The heartfelt and slightly disturbing revelations make for a claustrophobic experience as the words are draped and slathered across atonal guitar and creeping, sinister electronics. At times it is a strange, harsh, almost industrial setting for her low-key delivery; and at others, it becomes more expansive, leaning in a twisted folk direction.

Either way, this album feels more personal than 2022’s Crease, the album cover actually showing her face this time, although the feeling remains that she is inhabiting the microphone along with some other restless urge. There are points where the abstract smears of sound are barely recognisable as guitars and this is part of the appeal of the album; everything is loose and interwoven, sparse yet somehow insidious. The vocal confusion suits the static lurches and the post-nuclear minimalist secrets, along with the enigma of the sidewinder.

Spine veers from the doomy, alt-folk aridity of “Remember Me” and “At His Hands” to the less structured impressionistic daubs of “Fading” with its resonant talk of crashing and burning. The mix of ingredients and the disparity of sounds across the ten tracks on Spine is impressive and considering she has played almost everything here, it is quite the feat. Unlikely juxtapositions abound and the geiger counter beat of “Gelatin” is severed and buried along with the words: “a preacher with no voice”. It is mysterious and more than a little alien.

In fact, the final track sounds as if she is prospecting for something on a distant planet while creaking robots stumble and grapple in her wake. She is whispering in the corner as sirens wail and simmer. A real stretch from the doomy impending piano notes of “Under”. Here the emotion increases as she insists that we “Find a way, please help me”; whereas the tension shifts on the ethereal whirring folk of “At His Hands” and here she whispers, “Let me help you, let me kill you” to a suffocating degree.

These juxtapositions of emotion and strength along with the disparate, desolate instrumentation and intimate production make Spine a necessary next step on Kee’s route of discovery and one that should be lapped up by all adventurous musical travellers.

-Mr Olivetti-