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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Katie Von Schleicher’s “Shitty Hits”

Katie von Schleicher’s voice is masterful: smoky, breathy, spooky, agile. Throughout the facetiously titled Shitty Hits, she explores the edges. She bottoms out with a damaged rasp on “Paranoia” just before throwing wide the gates with a chorus of “la la la”s. On lo-fi opus “The Image,” she scrapes the ceiling, putting the needle in the red while the guitars and synths drone and jitter. “Mary” swoons nervously until von Schleicher invokes the title character in a way that makes you imagine “All Apologies” as rendered by Mazzy Star savoring her last cigarette at the end of a three-day creep. Endlessly moody and surprisingly versatile, this record moves by its own secret logic. Sometimes the pretty parts get fuzzed out and beaten down by bleating production, and sometimes those bits end up being pretty for completely unexpected reasons.

Patrick Rapa