The country acts who break in the UK are usually the ones perceived as reformers, as if there is something automatically suspect about the genre’s heartland. But anyone beguiled by Kacey Musgraves and Sturgill Simpson’s musical expansiveness should be impressed by the raw emotional space that 25-year-old Kalie Shorr forced open with her debut album, sowing switchblades amid tough, pop-influenced country. The year before Shorr self-released Open Book, her sister died of a heroin overdose; she battled anorexia and an unfaithful, violent ex. She surveys the wreckage on hard-bitten opener Too Much to Say, warning listeners that they may find her candour uncomfortable. But Shorr’s empathy and humour makes the opposite true.
She is a gifted storyteller and master of punchlines. “Everybody needs an escape,” she laments on the sweet, sighing Escape, a song about her family’s vices, “… and mine was leaving.” The World Keeps Spinning recounts the unfairly gorgeous January day when she learned of her sister’s death. “I drive by a wedding on the way to your funeral,” she sings tenderly. “I bet the bride was happy that the weather was beautiful.”
Her songs about her disappointing exes are her weakest, bar F U Forever, a roof-raising riposte to a bloke who “hated when my dreams came true / ’cause they were better as just dreams to you”. It’s emblematic of Shorr’s gift for reading people – like the girl in the emo-tinged Alice in Wonderland who drinks a toxic guy’s poison and “starts shrinking” – and herself. Gatsby is a fantastic, self-deprecating hot-mess anthem that’s as deep as it is desperate. There’s “a million friends that I don’t know with a front-row seat to my shit show,” she deadpans. Going by her startling debut, that’s just the start.
