With two albums, The Eternal Rocks Beneath and The Pendulum Swing behind her, and tours aplenty to support them (including a recent trek with Suzanne Vega) singer songwriter Katherine Priddy’s third album is keenly anticipated and deftly delivered. These Frightening Machines is a reckoning with forces beyond your control. It was written and recorded as she enters her thirties, and the machinery in the title is her own body and mind’s workings and malfunctions, as well as the machinery of connections and visions, of friendships and passions, of the systems that we are a part of, and that almost enclose us – almost, not quite.
Opening track and lead single “Matches” concerns the witch trials, the hideous spellcraft of the male inquisitor’s gaze – “fingers point when hands are tied/sink or swim, the loaded die...”, delivered low and sotto voce against a clattery, unsettling music, Rob Ellis’s drums and percussion rumbling deep down below. The title song is compact, poetically charged reflection on the tension lines thrumming between body and self, health and illness, the body and the body politic, while the catchy pop hooks of “Sirius” grab you from the off, with its descending chorus drawing you in and down into this Dog Star of a song, encompassing the personal and the cosmic, wrapped up in the brightest star in the sky.
“Hurricane” is a bossa nova narrative of lustiness, obsession and pain, arriving in one storm front. It’s packed with witty couplets, if not couplings – “Played me like a minor chord / I picked my part, you wrote the score”, wrapped in a weave of harmony vocals for the chorus. “Madeline”, a song of solidarity among women, is a more acoustic, stripped-down affair, Priddy duetting with American singer/songwriter Torres.
Throughout, she’s accompanied by a core trio of multi-instrumentalists Ben Christophers and Patrick Pearson, and drummer Rob Ellis, augmented by the likes of cello, trumpet, sax, and flute, giving her songs bigger, more ambitious arrangements and settings, though her guitar work shines through on “A Matter of Time”, a late-night ballad reflecting on that ultimate rite of passage, the one with no return, and embroidered by delicate musical abstractions that play with time.
The album’s lyrical richness is matched by the musically expansive settings she brings to them. They’re intimate rather than confessional, story songs that open up their meanings and impact by degree. Arresting and assured, These Frightening Machines opens up new pathways for this most singular songwriting talent.
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