Katy J Pearson
Sound of the Morning
Heavenly
Jul 19, 2022
Web Exclusive
On Katy J Pearson’s whimsically titled 2020-released debut album, Return, we found the daydreaming company of a soft and sunlit singer, her warm, fluttering vibrato defining its landscape. With a tender tendency toward the tuneful, Pearson offered a warm embrace of pastoral, country-marinated folk, pricked occasionally and sweetly by exuberant, exalted alt-pop.
With Sound of the Morning Pearson has conjured and fine-tuned a far more confident, almost irresistible song set. Swift swings at disco, soul, and funk-punk splash color across the canvas of Pearson’s ever expanding art, while beauteous brass and subtle synths stretch her music into something entirely more enveloping. The more traditional, countrified sound of Return isn’t lost, more that it’s built upon, and tangents taken from its foundation.
Undeniably joyous, “Howl” has a hurried hook that won’t let you loose. The opening title track gifts an acoustic arpeggio over which Pearson sweetly soars. “Talk Over Town” swoops skyward into the yearning refrain, “Can you show me something I’m missing?/Is it something I can live without?” Pearson offering a cryptic insight into separation and loneliness that resonates even as it blurs.
The insistent beat of “Confession” carries the anxious lyric—“I scramble out of bed, wrap my blanket tight/Darkness creeping, walking out into the night”—yet Pearson’s introspection is brilliantly buoyed by the brightness of her delivery, the honey glaze of Ali Chant’s admirable production creating a delightfully bittersweet whole.
On “Storm to Pass” Pearson laments the passing of time—“As you cut across corn and all the crop/Where the harvest was”—but reassures mysteriously “You will be alright/Something’s happening/I will be there too.” The closing cover of Paul Giovanni’s “Willow’s Song” from the endlessly influential soundtrack to folk-horror classic The Wicker Man, is a smart summation of the record—spectral, elusive and at the same time, even with its threatening/promising lyric, a summery, shimmering joy. (www.heavenlyrecordings.com/artist/katy-j-pearson/)
Author rating: 8/10
Average reader rating: 8/10
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