Review: Rowan Katz sits on the edge of spellbinding insanity with debut EP, ‘Violet’
This alternative darling carves out a truly tragic and poetic set of songs, an impressive debut of grand devastation.
The woods stands at attention. The bark glistens underneath the sun’s soft gaze. The leaves capture droplets of sorrow on their skin, but that’s not what has your attention ⎯⎯ at first. Deep rustic burgundy crackles and pops, imprinting an image of strength and striking beauty. Rowan Katz‘s eyes waver, ever so slightly, a moment of uncertainty caught on film, and their skin is damaged but with a sweet complexion. They’re made of molecules that burn, gold and silvery pixie dust cast in between each tree. “I haven’t healed at all,” they whisper in wispy and weathered frowns. “Still Here” is not an end but a means to one. It’s the bookend of their debut extended play, a seven-track confessional of rawness scavenged from underneath their fingertips which show blood and bone and brokenness and dirt and gravel. She cuts the wounds back open, retelling the gruesome tale, “For a month, I could not sleep / I had nightmares of an unborn child / I was bursting at the seams, caught in a war fought between tame and wild…” Violet, as it’s appropriately titled, illustrates the very salt-of-the-earth mythos of a troubled soul whose life was nearly snuffed out at the hands of foam-mouthed, savage, beastly, barking dogs. They learn to slay their demons to better understand their own identity, their wants and needs, and what should come next in their life.
“They could write a novel / Trying to diagnose you / But the truth is you’re a slave to your body,” Katz, once an LA and then later an NYC transplant, now residing in Olympia, Washington, manages to observe with opener “Slave to Your Body (Freedom).” Waves of rhythms peek and bob between syllables. They’re queer and draw upon a mythical absurdity that is innately them, born of such a uniqueness that couldn’t possible exist in a natural state. Or so society claimed, conditioned us to believe. But it does, and they possess a voice that just feels so damn good. Encased in a frantic soundscape of devilish witchy charm, owed in large part to their staunch religiosity that goes far beyond the mere physical world. The titular cut is seemingly a fairy tale ripped from their own reality, a foggy acoustic-framed moment, and Katz carves the heart from their chest with an exactness that is devastating and bloody. “She’s gonna take her tongue and sew her eyes / So your wicked voice don’t seek to end her peace / There is so much pain and so much time / But she is no child she is the god of your regret,” they sing, whittling a magnificently solemn incantation which later erupts into a dreamy, sky-bound howl.
Produced by Jesse Benson in the basement of a Brooklyn apartment, Violet is an authoritative construction, built upon a hearty plot of earth, stakes driven seven-feet deep. Katz rarely tolerates the penetrating dismissiveness they have long endured, and so these seven songs are their coming clean, mostly with themselves. They wallow in each terrible moment (“Bite and kick and scratch up my soul / Your heart is made of platinum and I love walkin’ on hot coals,” they sing with “Pale Eyes,” snarling, a cracked roar escaping her pearly lips), and all in all, it’s a pretty grim existence but one that comes with an enlightenment few are ever blessed to conceive. “The devil is sitting on top of the sun and smiling at me with the stars on his tongue,” Katz wrestles, feeling strangled by their own swollen membranes packed between nerves and skull. “The Truth” leaks with mournful moans, an examination of burgeoning faith. They later cry out, in measured sighs, “Jesus won’t love me, so what can I do / I’ll take off my dress, and then lay down with you…”
Violet is a transcendent mix of brash solemnity and ravaging sensuality of lyricism (“Can you fuck the pain right out of me?” they probe on “WHA!”) and erratic, high-voltage musicality (the thread-lines needled from start-to-finish is mesmerizing and tantalizingly jarring). The stories remain vague enough as to allow each unwitting voyeur to satisfy their own emotional desires, further cementing the set’s permanence. Katz is the kind of gift we’d regret missing. They’re brutal and bruised and wholly invigorating. This is the beginning.
