Music Review: Muna frontwoman Katie Gavin makes her solo debut with folky, evocative ‘What A Relief’

On “What a Relief,” the debut solo album from Katie Gavin, the Muna frontwoman tackles love, family and selfhood through folk and country twang that departs from the band’s usual dance-forward pop.

Don’t worry, this isn’t the end of Muna — the trio of Gavin, Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin are still making and performing music together. Her bandmates participate here, too, with Maskin playing on seven of the 12 songs. But Gavin’s solo project — the first away from the band for any of the three since it formed in 2013 — is a defined, separate entity. These songs, written over seven years, are the introverted folk siblings of the band’s extroverted pop.

Take “Sparrow,” a striking song that opens with the sounds of birds. Over a guitar melody, Gavin sings about longing for a sparrow’s call, a signal she’s assigned to a lover. “Come winter, come winter/I lost my lover,” she sings, her tone steady. “Just like the birds/She’d up and gone.”

While she waits, sick trees are treated with chemicals, inadvertently killing the birds that call them home. “The earth had been poisoned,” she explains. “And I was still listening/For sparrow song.”

A closer listen reveals that the chirps aren’t taken from nature after all, but electronic.

That combination of natural and synthetic forces, of beauty alongside melancholy, is at the heart of “What a Relief.”

Another example: On “The Baton,” Gavin considers motherhood on top of an airy synth, flexible fiddle and drumbeat. It’s the fiddle that amplifies lyrics about generational trauma, healing and learning, like a folk tale shared across generations. The synth, swelling underneath, is Gavin’s modern twist.

“I’d pass her the baton and/I’d say you better run,” she sings of a hypothetical daughter, “‘Cause this thing has been going/For many generations/But there is so much healing/That still needs to be done.”

Gavin’s album reveals her specific inner life, examining relationships less frequently covered in Muna’s work — like the ones between mother and daughter, mother and dog, Mother Earth and her creatures.

Romantic relationships aren’t ignored, however, but they are made complicated. Indie rock singer-songwriter Mitski duets with Gavin on “As Good As It Gets,” a happy-sad ode to a partnership that has reached a leveling point. Perhaps it’s for the best, the duo concedes, when love’s magic melts into the mundane.

Gavin channels Alanis Morissette in the bridge of the addictive “Aftertaste,” the single that introduced her as a solo artist. She’s preoccupied with a partner who is gone, but painfully front-of-mind.

“And I’m living/On the aftertaste,” she sings in the chorus. “Don’t you tell me it’s too late.”

Like the ache it describes, her words and their upbeat delivery linger. It’s evocative of Gavin’s best songwriting — a deeply felt experience.

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