K. Flay - Crush Me EP
- Written by Marky Edison
“The boy I love’s got another girl/ He might be fucking her right now”
The brash sexuality of lead single ‘Blood In The Cut’ is as honest and confrontational as Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ or Alanis Morissette’s ‘You Oughta Know’. Where Morissette sang over the Red Hot Chili Peppers, K.Flay provides her own backing, a blend of lo-fi pop, hip hop and electronica with live drums and guitar, while she delivers her revelatory analysis in the throaty, lazy fashion of MIA or Martina Topley-Bird.
American singer and songwriter K. Flay (Kristine Flaherty) has toured with Snoop Dogg, Passion Pit, 3Oh!3, Icona Pop, Third Eye Blind and Dashboard Confessional. She released a self-titled EP in 2010 and signed with RCA soon after. Her disparate sounds and influences ultimately lead to her leaving the label and she crowdfunded her debut album, Life As A Dog. The success of that album brought her to the attention of Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds who signed her to his Night Street label, a subdivision of Interscope, and made Crush Me the first release from his new venture.
'Blood In The Cut' starts out with a muted guitar with Flaherty's vocals sounding wounded and isolated. The quiet menace of the verse is countered by the big beats and synths that follow the chorus. It's a classic indie rock structure in the Pixies mould with overtones of a more reflective Macklemore & Lewis and culminates in a big singalong refrain. Flaherty has been bubbling under for a couple of years now and if any track can break her into the mainstream on her own terms, it's this one. It's an absolute cracker of a tune.
'Hollywood Forever' follows a similar template but with more of a swaying groove. The title of the track comes from the celebrity graveyard and the tone of the lyrics sound bitterly sarcastic. Sung differently this could be a vapid Katy Perry style celebration of celebrity but Flaherty injects the tune with mournful regret of broken dreams.
Flaherty usually produces her own records but for Crush Me she called in Nashville-based producer JT Daly, and LA-based producer Simon Says. The difference in the quality of the production between Life as a Dog and this new EP is substantial. 'Dreamers' opens with a synth line straight from the Chemical Brothers songbook. K.Flay started out playing rap clubs and 'You Felt Right' sounds more traditionally hip hop than the other tracks but where her earlier work wove between her rap beginnings and her indie sensibility, the latter has definitely won out on Crush Me. The hip hop history has made her lyrics more interesting and more inventively rhythmic than your average indie pop singer. Crush Me is K.Flay's most accomplished and coherent work to date and she has a substantial back catalogue behind her to bolster the live show. Well worth checking out if she continues to produce songs of this quality.
Crush Me is available from iTunes.