- Katie Dey is an enigma. In Australia, she’s still a little-known, outsider pop weirdo. Yet the impact of her work is felt across the world, in the corridors of taste-making. Her unique approach to vocal production -feeding a spun-sugar falsetto through a studio wood-chipper- is the surprisingly perfect counterweight to her often adorably twee pop. With possible apologies to Spirit Bunny it’s like nothing else you’ll hear around here: a technicolour splatter on our wide, brown land. To complete that enigmatic figure, Dey’s stylistic approach also makes her literally difficult to understand. I get the feeling that’s more important now, with her third LP, that this record comes with more of an urge to communicate its message than before.
If you can decipher the lyrics (thank god they’re up on her Bandcamp page - much appreciated), you might almost mistake the record’s opening gestures for pretty standard pop love songs. There’s something more intense, urgent than that, however. Repeated references to commingling souls with some romantic other, just ‘abandoning our shells’, can become a bit alarming, as on single, Stuck, “I was born inside this body, and I'm stuck there / I'm a storm inside a rotting false construction.” It’s utterly at odds with the happily plunking piano accompaniment, like Katie Dey is trying desperately to maintain a smiling facade while carrying on a whispered conversation out of the corner of her mouth, about whether it might be better to end it all.
The intensity only increases on the following number, Dissolving, “I won't need to know when I get out of it / My vessel / Of bullshit / I won't need to know when I'm getting cremated / Sweet fire of / My death bed” and the music seems to match the tone of the lyrics more here: surging forward with great intent. Still, there’s a ringing background ambience that implies some kind of transcendental power at work: a beauty in being able to escape mundane shackles and be at one with the universe.
Much of what I’ve loved about Dey’s work, previously is simply the bonding of sweet pop with the explosive strangeness of her experiments. Solipsisters is something more than that: an intimate journey through Dey’s soul via warped but still oaring balladry. It mingles truly troubling discontent and self loathing with some kind of ineffable joy that spills through in the music and can’t be extinguished. It’s made most obvious on the final number, Sieve, which sounds like nothing so much as the beautifully sweet sorrow of Regina Spektor, laced with medically unsound doses of psychotropics. I don’t think either the manic joy or the acute depression wins out here and that’s a hard thing to behold. However, in a time where people can be more honest about what’s going on inside, it feels like this is an important journey to take. Solipsisters is everything about Katie Dey that’s previously galvanised my attention and a journey into the heart of her enigma.
- Chris Cobcroft.