I have a special affinity for punk bands who are able to make smooth and delicious R'nB, or rather, R'nB bands who approach writing and performing like 'an 80s punk band, and letting their natural grittiness rise to the surface through a curtain of streetwise timbre. I'm not sure which exposition Cleveland's The Katy would prefer, but they are definitely some mixture of the two. Taking their name from blues revue standby "She Caught the Katy," and inspired by a congregation of talents as diverse as The Clash and Billie Holiday, their debut self-title is the stark inheriter of these differentiated canons, and something of a more progressive order of divergence than their combination would necessarily anticipate. Leaning into the heart of the matter, the album seems to find its sturdiest ballast point with "Elbowroom," a mid-sequence song, which makes space for band leader Cathalyn's voice and the quiet rumble of her bass playing to illuminate a dissenting path into the full swell of the group's nurturing enclave of acid-fringed, jazz-organ murmurations, loadbearing and dependable percussion, and an encultured environ suffused with the practiced calm and evocative pretense of a beat poetry reading. The tendrils of "Elbowroom" wind through the levels and wells of the rest of the album, transforming the decadent potential of each into flourishing gardens of ambitious aural adventure. "Bonnie Single" is possessed of a generative, kosmische scan that perpetually uncovers new dimensions of warmth and variance within the street sounds and metropolitan nesting material it uses to furnish its abode. "Market Cornered" is a deep, funk and R'nB slide that feels like a bathtub draining in reverse, as in, once uncorked, it will fill until overflowing, drunkenly submerge you in lavender and the kiss of exotic flowers peddles. "Juice" is a sweet, slick and funky kind of jam that sees Cathalyn channeling a raw and righteous Corinne Bailey Rae, and "Who You Are" is a bubble-blowing, sugar crawl through the gutter of the heart that drags itself deliberately to the light of epiphany. The Katy is as The Katy does, and the Katy pretty much does it all.
