Katy Mae - You May Already Be A Winner Review
Posted by Jes Tones on 10.10.2008
Follow up EP to Brooklyn "alt country" band Katy Mae's 2007 debut full length album The Sweetheart Deal...
This band was described to me as “Brooklyn Alt Country.” Of course I was in. Then I did a little research and even read about comparisons to Wilco and Uncle Tupelo—I was double in. So, you see, I wanted to like this EP…I tried very hard to like this EP, but I just couldn’t get there. The first few guitar chords sounded promising (although admittedly derivative, but derivative of bands I like, most noticeably Ryan Adams & The Cardinals), but once the lyrics hit it didn’t take much time before I was lost and even somewhat frustrated.
The EP consists of five tracks: “Two Dollars Late,” “Falls Down,” “Dust Of My Friends,” “You May Already Be A Winner” and “Let Me Bring You Down” and is a follow up to the band’s 2007 debut release The Sweetheart Deal and presumably the predecessor to a full length album to be released this year. The thing about EPs though, is that they’re supposed to spark one’s interest enough to make them go out and buy the full length record, and, in this respect, this EP failed miserably in my mind.
To be fair, the music is not bad. It is, as described, “alt country,” although it sounded much more alt (rock) than country. Much of it just sounded…familiar. And although this tends to provoke the label “unoriginal” (I’m not going that far), it was familiar in a good way. The sound and feel of the album did make me think of bands I like at certain points, it was really the lyrics and voice of lead singer Phil Doucet that I could not get into. It took me awhile to figure it out, but Doucet’s voice reminded me of The Counting Crow’s Adam Duritz. And, once I thought about it, the EP in general sounded more like Counting Crows to me than Wilco or Uncle Tupelo. Although “Let Me Bring You Down,” which is probably the most likeable, or at least radio-friendly, track on the album, did invoke a little Tom Petty.
As for lyrical content, I listened to this EP several times, even writing down the lyrics for myself trying to make sense of it all, and I still didn’t get it. In the end, it just seemed like someone trying so hard to be poetic that he ended up being cliché. For example, “Dust Of My Friends,” begins with “cover me up with the blood and the dust of my friends, buy me a drink and I’ll fall off asleep in the sand, show me a place where the moon overlaps with the grass, blow me a kiss for the sake of my unhappiness”—um, yeah. Or, for example, “Falls Down,” repeats “everyone falls down I do mean eve-ry-one, everyone needs time to let things go…I don’t need no sal-va-tion Sunday song, I don’t need no well spring of hope” several times and I just couldn’t get the image of that cliché coffee shop guy with a guitar oozing fake intensity while spewing meaningless lyrical sentiment.
In short, I hate to shit on a relatively new artist, but, in this case, I really felt like I didn’t have a choice. That’s not saying that this band won’t come back with a fabulous full length, and in all fairness I have not had the chance to check out the first album, which for all I know was a work of supreme musical genius. But this review is not about those albums, it’s about Katy Mae’s “You May Already Be A Winner” EP which, pretty clearly, was not.
The 411: Based solely on this EP, I would not buy the full length album. It has its ups and downs for sure, but overall I think Katy Mae's material still needs a lot of work.
