Wispy, gauzy beauty: This Is The Kit, Barbican, reviewed

On the way home from This Is The Kit’s show at a socially distanced Barbican, I listened to Avalon by Roxy Music, which had been brought to mind by the previous 90 minutes or so of music. It’s perhaps worth saying that This Is The Kit — the nom de chanson of Kate Stables, backed by a three-piece band and three horn players — have absolutely nothing in common with Avalon by Roxy Music, visually or musically.

Stables, hair piled on top of her head, and dressed for comfort, not speed, did not look as though she intended to boost the Colombian export trade after the show; perhaps, instead, she would be offering forthright opinions about agribusiness over a lentil bake. Her lyrics did not concern themselves with the ennui of the partier who has exhausted their appetite for hedonism; they were vague, a bit self-helpy, and on occasion truly eyebrow-raising: ‘Fragile sanity, you’re treating us so roughly,’ she sang on ‘Hotter Colder’, eschewing subtle allusiveness for a wallop round the head. As for the music, well, there were no banjos on Avalon, a record distinctly lacking in folkiness.

Then why did the earnest folk-pop of This Is The Kit summon thoughts of Roxy? Because of the wispy, gauzy beauty of the music. On Avalon, a lot of the songs are barely there: they are basslines from which instrumental and vocal baubles have been hung to create something greater than the sum of the parts. That’s precisely the feeling I got listening to this band performing these songs. It should be said that these were properly constructed songs — they were not mere wisps — but each element was so perfectly judged that they were like interlocking cogs and wheels, running in unison, all hanging off Stables’s banjo or guitar, which was always the tentpole of the song.

The most distinctive Roxyness came from Neil Smith, playing electric guitar.