Kathy Zimmer “Opening Band”
Cosmopolitan folk in your ears
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‘Cosmopolitan Folk in Your Ears’ is Kathy’s description of this 5 track ep. It arrived wrapped in handmade cardboard curtains, sealed shut with a sticker, the packaging a tiny performance in its own right.
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This is modern New York folk, comprised of nods to early 60s Greenwich Village, a voice with the enunciation but not the abstract purity of Joan Baez, and hints at a fondness for English pastoral folk (perhaps as redone by the Smoke Fairies). This is combined with something very 21st century in the small drops of violin and percussion: the first tiny whirl of cymbals on ‘Winter’ is repeated once, then again, bigger and a little bolder, but just a small moment in the entire song.
It takes someone smart to be careful not to inundate her sound with extraneousness, and even smarter to do this without sounding ethereal. This is innovative. None of the five songs are particularly distinct from the others, though perhaps the repetition and madrigal-esque echoes of the words ‘coming back, coming back’ in Fairytale make it stand out. All are wordy and soft. A whole album would be too much, unless Kathy can differentiate between tracks without losing what is special about her sound, but this is a very nice EP.
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