Ms Kim’s magnus opus gets the thumbs up
It’s been a lengthy wait between Katie Kim’s debut album, Twelve, and the 20-song opus that is Cover and Flood, but it was worth the wait.
For the uninitiated, Kate Kim are a collective under the stewardship of Waterford songwriter Kate O’Sullivan. The band contains members of other Waterford musical contemporaries such as Deaf Joe and John ‘Spud’ Murphy, but under the watchful eye of O’Sullivan’s atmospheric compositions, they are more than the sum of their parts.
Cover and Flood follows in many ways the template laid down by Twelve , i.e. moody and a tad shoegazey tracks, breathily whispered out for the most part by O’Sullivan and accompanied by piano, strings and unobtrusive guitar.
The main difference is the augmentation of Twelve’s more experimental and ‘crackly’ moments, which are turned into the foundational palette for Cover and Flood. They set the tone and mood of the album brilliantly, joining the dots in the lo-fi ebb and flow and teeing up the main tracks nicely.
Of these, the excellent single ‘Heavy Lightning’ stands out, as does ‘Your Mountains’ and the fabulous ‘Little Dragon’. 20 tracks may have been ambitious in some people’s eyes, but you hardly notice the time pass by, as the album drifts, gorgeously and intriguingly, towards its end.
