Kee Avil—the solo moniker of Vicky Mettler—debuted two years ago with Crease, an album of torched, twisted post-punk. On Spine, her follow-up, the Montreal experimentalist strips down her sound to tremendous and disarming effect, suturing the avant-garde ethos that has long propelled her work with a sort of nervous immediacy. Most of the ten songs are sparer and slower than those on Crease—a welcome change of tack that foregrounds her recursive lyricism and idiosyncratic guitar playing. Album opener “Felt” begins with a haunting guitar lick and closely layered vocals; as the song progresses, one vocal track peels back from its companion, revealing a raw edge that had been smoothed over. This technique recurs across Spine, giving form to one of the album’s most prominent themes: how the self becomes either composed or fragmented through the passage of time. On “The Iris Dry,” she figures time as a “lampshade made of leather” and memory as “smoke, pillowy and brittle”—an evocative couplet that rhymes with the musical tone. On “Showed You,” she laments “whispering all the while in decay / there’s those who leave and those who stay.” To move through time, she suggests, is to always be searching through oneself as if through detritus. Spine is a record of digging—and from a field dense with references to genres from industrial to folk music, Kee Avil unearths a buried clarity.
Brennan McCracken is a writer from K’jipuktuk (Halifax) living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). He is currently completing PhD studies at the Department of English at Concordia University.