Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith follows up a collaborative album with electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani and her breakthrough long player EARS with her latest journey, The Kid. A double album in length that portrays the earliest steps of life's journey through a majestic sense of awe, mysticism and wonder.
True to its childhood theme the album is split across four emotionally-inspired segments that take in the various stages of life's first moments through to the realisations of growing up and apart. The first quarter draws its focus on the newly found feeling of confused astonishment - everything is brand new and glistening in the morning sun. This traverses through an emotional focus that takes hold, Kaitlyn's lyrical content perfectly conveying these feelings of confirmation that turn into a sense of pure being, fittingly building further on the electronic experiments of her breakthrough EARS.
The second section starts up with an explorative feeling of reaching out and grasping the immediacy of the world around us, captured through a series of sonic experiments that reach deep into the soul and emerge armed with a range of sounds that stem from a Bollywood-esque low-end pulse melodies that call to mind the sound of Julia Holter's wonderful experiments within her Ekstasis.
The second half begins by confronting the ideas of giving back to the formative forces of one's upbringing, this is investigated with the range of influences that Kaitlyn's music draws from as an entity, from cosmic electronica to the most out there pop sounds, this cross-genre feeling is both vast within its otherworldly approach, yet retains a familiarity that will dazzle all that get swept up in its EMS Synthi 100 led tropical ambient sound.
Drawing The Kid to its final notes, the fourth segment gives itself into Kaitlyn's verdant orchestral moments that were all written and arranged for the EU-based Stargaze quartet. While the album reaches its final conclusion, the focus is drawn towards "a return to pure being, the kind of wisdom and peace that eludes most of us until the autumn of life". A bittersweet refrain holds us tight with the album's most striking line “one day I’ll wake up and you won’t be there” showing the way forward on a road that lies split between the closing moments of the record while shedding any melancholy resentment against loss that you may feel, overpowering these feelings with a grateful acknowledgement of life. These two roads crossing paths within the near perfect waves of sound, floating out of the speakers with an elegant flow while the music slowly unwinds to its end.
The Kid is another brilliant album from this unique talent, ripe with the imagined wonder and innocence of youth.
