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

25 September 2012 | 10:21 am | Dave Drayton

Something For Kate success lies in their ability to take the melancholic and set it to melody, to make the bleakest pop palatable, to have the tired sound triumphant.

More Something For Kate More Something For Kate

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.