Moonshine First Goes

Moonshine Freeze came out in July 2017 as This Is the Kit’s fourth album and its first for Rough Trade, a band record made in Bristol with brass and synths on it. On March 30, 2018, the label added a short coda, Moonshine First Goes: four of its songs in what the title calls their first goes, as a digital EP of just over 13 minutes. “By My Demon Eye” went out on its own two weeks earlier. The credits name one musician on every track: Kate Stables, on vocals and guitar.

The album had a long run-up. Bashed Out (2015) was made with Aaron Dessner of the National in his Brooklyn garage, and in September 2016 Stables, Rozi Plain and Jamie Whitby-Coles worked on new material at a Berlin festival Dessner co-curated. Then the band went back to Bristol, to Geoff Barrow’s Invada Studios, and to John Parish, who had produced the debut, Krülle Bol, in 2008. Plain, Whitby-Coles, Neil Smith and Jesse D. Vernon played, and Dessner joined on six of the 11 tracks. NPR noted that it was the first time the band had used brass and pronounced synthesizers. The first goes have none of that. Press at the time called them acoustic, and each one is shorter than its album version.

The running order changes too. “Bullet Proof” still comes first, at 3:58 against 4:10. On the album Stables plays banjo on it over two guitars, Plain’s bass and Whitby-Coles’s drums, and Record Collector singled it out for how sparingly the instruments were used. The song opens on a tide coming in and bullet holes “rushing in”, and further on she addresses herself by name: “There are things to learn here, Kate.” “Show Me So” moves up from ninth to second, at 3:15 against 3:36. On the album it is one of the songs where Parish sits in on drums, bass, piano and percussion, and Drowned in Sound called it a “haunting ballad”. It opens by asking to be walked around town, and told, and shown.

“By My Demon Eye” began, by Stables’s account, as a piece built around the song that Rabbit and Tortoise sing in a story told by Hugh Tracey, the British collector of African music, whose voice she loved. She translates the chorus as “boil boil water boil let the liar be boiled”. People tend to take it for a gentle, happy song, she says; for her it is about two people with no way out of the mess they are in. On the album four members of the band sing on it. The title track closes the EP and shrinks the most, from 3:41 to 2:46. It started with a children’s clapping game, saying “moonshine” three times and then freezing, which Stables heard as a spell about change, and its first line is “As the change sets in”. It was the album’s lead single, with brass and synths flaring through it.

The EP drew little press of its own. Time Out’s preview of a Philadelphia show in April 2018 bundled it with the album as an “acoustic kid-sister EP” and called both “pretty and strong”. The album had done well. Metacritic’s average was 78 from 17 reviews, the Irish Times gave it five stars, Drowned in Sound 9 out of 10 and The Line of Best Fit 8, and Paste placed it 26th among the albums of 2017. The Guardian and The Skinny gave it three stars, The Skinny finding it pleasant but low-key. The Observer credited Parish with keeping the arrangements minimal and Stables’s singing at the centre.

That last point is the case for Moonshine First Goes. If the album’s strength was a producer keeping out of the way of the songs, the first goes take the songs on their own: four melodies and Stables’s words, with only a guitar credited beside them. At four songs and no new material, it is a footnote to the album, not a way into it. As a record of these songs at their barest, it does what its title says. In July 2018 Rough Trade went the other way with Moonshine Freeze Remixes: Blue States on “Bullet Proof”, Clas Tuuth on “Two Pence Piece” and two versions of the title track, by LONA and Drones Club.