Keel Her - Prize Catch

Rose Keeler-Schaffeler is an artist blissfully unconcerned with the glossy production values, clichéd lyrics and formulaic hooks of the majority of contemporary pop music. There is no doubt though that Keeler-Schaffeler does make pop music. A bewitching kind of rudimentary fuzz pop that sounds almost unlike anything else this year. The evidence is incontrovertibly here on the glorious debut EP released under the name Keel Her.

The four tracks on ‘Prize Catch’ are all of a very similar extremely lo-fi aesthetic, entirely written, recorded and produced in Keeler-Schaffeler’s bedroom. She’s extremely prolific and regularly uploads songs and fragments of sounds in astonishing volume to her Soundcloud account. You get the impression any of those songs could have been worthy of inclusion on the EP but the four selected here offer an excellent snapshot of her primitive charms.

The title track is a distorted fuzzy waltz, the lyrics are barely discernable but the few lines that can be made out display a nice taste in wry lyricism: “Then I’ll leave and never talk to you again” is just one choice line. The best track is the glam tinged ‘Robert’; the melody sounds like a long lost 70s glam record buried beneath a layer of distortion and fuzz. An example of how Keel Her takes seemingly old sounds and warps them into something rather more strange and unique. The song itself is an ode to her newfound collaborator, and legendary figure in lo-fi indie, with Keeler-Schaffeler exuberantly exclaiming that “I just wanna be like R. Stevie Moore.”

The final two tracks are both slightly longer in length but no less appealing. ‘Pop Hurl’ introduces a greater degree of subtlety and depth and is perhaps an indication of where Keel Her’s music may head as her song writing develops. There is a lovely yearning quality to her voice as she plaintively cries, “I wish you’d take me out.” Final track ‘Agitated’ returns to a very basic garage rock sound punctuated by a spoken word section that seemingly includes the line “Kiss my butt” or maybe it doesn’t, you can never really tell and that is the beauty of Keel Her’s music.