Release Date: Jul 8, 2022
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Indie Rock, Alternative Singer/Songwriter, Indie Folk
Record label: Heavenly
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An album that never loses its capability to surprise, from the very first listen, you know you’ll be coming back to it again and again When Bristol’s Katy J Pearson first appeared in 2020 with her debut album Return, she seemed to be pigeonholed as part of a new wave of country singers. Listening to it now, it’s nowhere near a Nashville sound, and two years later, her follow up, Sound Of The Morning, is defined by one thing: a complete inability to be pigeonholed. Like all the best albums, Sound Of The Morning is a tough one to categorise.
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.
There is a keep calm and carry on spirit to Katy J Pearson's impressively melodious second album. Much of the record sees Pearson attempting to navigate a newly uncertain world - variously the bonfire of recent world events, new relationships, and her changing status as a rising star - but, like its equally bright and breezy predecessor Return, Sound Of The Morning displays an irrepressible knack for songwriting. There's a nimbleness, too, as she sets her idiosyncratic voice to different settings: there's the Anais Mitchell-esque folk of the title track; the mid-80s' Kate Bush electronics of Howl; the electro-pop of Confession and Game of Cards.
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