The Singles Jukebox

Six years on, we take a second look at this Irish singer-songwriter…

[Video][Website]
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Katherine St Asaph: Cathy Davey’s first release since 2010 is a synthesis of the triumphant pop of Tales of Silversleeve and the windswept écriture feminine of The Nameless, i.e. everything I could have asked for. The intro could be any synthpop song released from 2010 to the impending collapse of the alt-pop bubble, were the voice inhabiting it not so uncharacteristically three-dimensional, so stubbornly intelligent. The rest is Davey’s own pattern: backing vocals buoyant as cirrus and alive as wolf-howls; tides of feelings and humanity at tide force and elemental scale, directed toward someone who couldn’t care less. (When this came out I’d just started reading Colette’s The Shackle, one of those perfect little synchronies.) Oh, and there’s also a great hook in there.
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Alfred Soto: A singer-songwriter who keeps an eye on the rhythm, Cathy Davey gets the important business out of the way to concentrate on the smaller things she cares about, such as delineating romantic travails. I wish her voice didn’t sound starchy, but otherwise this is better than acoustic Angel Olsen. 
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Hannah Jocelyn: It’s difficult to hear this song at first without wanting to make comparisons — first Davey sounds like Told Slant, then the spacey, distorted drums come in and it sounds like the time Regina Spektor went industrial, then the gorgeous chorus hits and renders the whole song near unclassifiable. This does meander a bit throughout, but every time I’ve heard it, I remain riveted by how the song flows together so well that it doesn’t, in fact, sound like there’s a pattern or song form holding it together. The check-and-balance of that restless production and Davey’s melodic sensibilities ultimately keep the song from losing control.
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Cassy Gress: She’s got a voice somewhere between Joanna Newsom and Nina Persson, but my initial reservations about her soft enunciation being too twee were misguided; her voice and the synths meander through melting chromatic chord changes. “You’d still be the mistress in a heartbeat,” she intones, over a muffled bass drum and crackling snare that evoke a heart in flames.
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Ryo Miyauchi: Cathy Davey lays down her vocals like how she plays with the dead moth in the video. She first likes how her thin voice can curl into a ball, then she gets more interested in how much she can stretch it until it disappears into the beat. Her ah-ahhs and the doo-doo-doos towards the end seems more like her playing around with the acoustics of the room than accenting the song with a thought for function. With a wanderlust song like this, the open wilderness made sense as the setting for the music to play out.
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Iain Mew: I love the glistening keyboard flourishes, which remind me of Elbow and more importantly provide a bit of recurring weight to a song which is enough of an effervescent stream that it nearly goes by without touching any sides.
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Claire Biddles: Like a PG-13 Lykke Li, this is witchy femininity with none of the associated terror.
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Edward Okulicz: Apart from the drums this could be a damned Stina Nordenstam song. And a good one, too! 
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Brad Shoup: The short-short-long buzz reminds me of the underlying groove in Gomez’s “Get Miles,” which itself sounded like someone messing with an aux cord. But this pattern is more of a garage rave-up, with startling pushes upward and a Lazy Line Painter Jane organ figure. “You’d still be the mistress in a heartbeat” is my favorite promise this year. 
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