Album Review: This Is The Kit – 'Off Off On'

Water imagery is all over This Is The Kit’s fifth album. The Paris-based, England-born musician recorded the album in Wales, next to a rushing river with the rest of her band and New York-based producer Josh Kaufman.

Exploring different genres, This Is The Kit flows with the current of her thoughts, and appears to be completely at home drifting down the stream.

Off Off On is a near-perfect folk album, full of quirky hidden gems and wonderful idiosyncrasies. She sounds vaguely like Aldous Harding on ‘Started Again’, but there are times when Laura Marling might be a more apt comparison. This Is The Kit moves gracefully through a wide spectrum of sounds, from the rock-tinged ‘This Is What You Get’ to the sleek jazz undertones of ‘Slider’.

Combining technical intricacy and simple, but richly-coloured poetry, ‘Shinbone Soap’ and ‘Was Magician’ lend the album a delightfully impressionistic quality. On Off Off On, This Is The Kit explores various aspects of the human condition. For all its thematic variety, it still manages to feel like a singular, stream-of-consciousness narrative. Excellent.

• Out now.
• 8/10