Shadows [LP]

Cate Kennan - Shadows [LP]

Los Angeles musician Cate Kennan’s self produced second full length unfolds with the poetry and immateriality of its title: Shadows. Ten vignettes of keys strings reverb and voice the songs sway and lope between dream and lullaby rose-colored but remote. The album was inspired by the dislocation Kennan felt upon returning after several years away to the rustic neighborhood northwest of L.A. where she’d grown up: “Wandering through a place where my life once existed but where everything had quietly shifted with time.” The music conjures a mood of distance dust and dazed emotion alternately lulling and unraveling. From shuffling tumbleweed vignettes (“The Lone West” “Romantic Strings”) to sepia-tone torch songs (“Shadows” “Reverie”) to oblique keyboard meditations (“Moonlight” “Rain”) Kennan’s soundworld moves with a muted murky beauty like alluring shapes seen through smudged glass. In her hands haze is a transformative property liberating melody and memory into landscapes still untraveled: “What began as a period of nostalgia for me turned into a longing not for the past for a place that might exist somewhere beyond the horizon.”