Shadows

Los Angeles musician Cate Kennan’s self-produced second full-length unfolds with the poetry and immateriality of its title: Shadows. 10 vignettes of keys, strings, reverb, and voice, the songs sway and lope between dream and lullaby, rose-colored but remote. The album was inspired by the dislocation Kennan felt upon returning, after several years away, to the rustic neighborhood northwest of L.A. where she’d grown up: “Wandering through a place where my life once existed but where everything had quietly shifted with time.”

The music conjures a mood of distance, dust, and dazed emotion, alternately lulling and unraveling. From shuffling tumbleweed vignettes (“The Lone West,” “Romantic Strings”) to sepia-tone torch songs (“Shadows,” “Reverie”) to oblique keyboard meditations (“Moonlight,” “Rain”), Kennan’s soundworld moves with a muted, murky beauty, like alluring shapes seen through smudged glass. In her hands, haze is a transformative property, liberating melody and memory into landscapes still untraveled: “What began as a period of nostalgia for me turned into a longing, not for the past, for a place that might exist somewhere beyond the horizon.”