Kathryn Williams – Presents… The Pond

I never really liked folk. It strays too much into regional cutesiness and sterile imagery, and it generally suffers from a massive personality disorder, ie everyone who makes it turns out to be a dick. It probably wasn’t a great idea to assign me to review Kathryn Williams, a prolific folk artist, on her new project The Pond, then.

It is true, I didn’t like folk. I didn’t like post-dubstep before The Weeknd, though, and I didn’t like hardcore before Death From Above. But once in a while, reader, there’s an album that takes a shit genre, knocks it out with a punch in the back of the head, guts it and throws the entrails over the rest of us. The Pond is a great album, and even though I think you’d get more of a sense of that through listening to it rather than reading the rest of this self-serving page of drivel, I’m contractually obliged to dither around with words like “dynamic” and “smooth”, so if you’re a masochist then prepare to watch me squirm.

Smooth, genre-busting, concise. Those are all your descriptive words. I don’t want to squirm so the rest of this I’m going to enjoy writing, because its tough work rehashing press releases, and I’d rather talk about this how it feels than give you a list of comparisons and “it’s kind of like…”s. There’s a certain type of music: The Weeknd does it a bit, Commix’s ‘How you gonna feel’ does it a lot, and some tracks of Kid A still pierce the “I’ve heard too much of Thom Yorke’s voice” barrier to make you feel like you’re slowly falling through cold milk.

Like one of those horribly wanky debut single “industry hype” tragedies, where bands that have finally been given enough money to rent a high speed SLR film a video, I feel serene, falling through a semi-viscous liquid in slow motion, I’m a bit spongy, there are pores in my body that the milk osmoses through, and it cleans out the dry bits at the back of my eyes. Each one of The Pond‘s quick 3 or 4 minute songs, vaguely straying into trip hop but then going back to a weird crossover between the Cardigans and the Futureheads, keeps me falling through the liquid.

I listen to this album and afterwards I feel clean. I feel nothing of the Admiral Fallow-patented “Wow it must be crazy living on a farm!!!!!” and I don’t want to pick up an acoustic guitar or smile with a fucking tamborine. I just feel clean. It’s a milky folk bath with none of the repercussions of normal folk. Listen to ‘The River’ or ‘Carved’ for downbeat, ‘Pass Us By’ for upbeat, and ‘Bebop’ for genre-twisting. Or just stop looking for 3 minute pick-me-ups and listen to the whole album. You won’t regret it.