Album Review: Something For Kate - Leave Your Soul To Science

Across their near-two decade existence Something For Kate have proven themselves to be, time and time again, a band that can occupy the peripheries of pop and indie and inject them with personality, breadth, and a certain darkness from their place in the wings and the shadows. Leave Your Soul To Science is no different – unabashedly broad in the territory it covers across 12 tracks.

The abrasive chorus of opener Star-Crossed Citizens arrives unannounced and hurls itself at you; The Fireball At The End Of Everything is littered with electronic tics and squelches; Deep Sea Divers is a tactile acoustic number; you feel the strain of plectrum on guitar strings, the sound captured unadorned and decorated with Paul Dempsey and Stephanie Ashworth's delicate harmonies; and, at the other end of the spectrum, a haunting Sooner Or Later You're Going To Have To Do Something About Me soon swells from fuzzed-out bass and organ to showcase some truly impressive guitar work. Lyrically, Dempsey turns his wry wordplay on the contemporary; modern relationships, the science of our times, the minutiae of miracles, inheritance and heretics – all examined from a limbo distance that allows his observations to be at once all-encompassing and painfully, personally acute.

There's a beauty in the sadness and exhaustion of Dempsey's voice, and, on tracks like the string-laden Miracle Cure, that sadness is so defiant that it shifts into something more buoyant. And that's the secret of Something For Kate, in full flight on Leave Your Soul…; their ability to take the melancholic and set it to melody, to make the bleakest pop palatable, to have the tired sound triumphant.