EP Review: Keeley Shade Give Me Time

New artist Keeley Shade has released her debut EP. It’s a small gem of Folk Pop meditative music which also dances softly with the deeper influences of Country. All five tracks shimmer and radiate out, from slow and quiet to rise in dramatic tension.

In spirit it belongs to the era of the Notorious Byrd Brothers of 1968. When turbulence and social unrest was boiling over to breaking point around the world, the Byrds delivered a masterpiece of healing, regret and the reverie of times gone which were always a dream anyway.

That is The Mend. Starts soft and pastoral with bird sounds and the Dolphin Smile cries of 1968. Slowly opens out and soars. There is a feeling of deep peace here at the centre of the EP.

For Shade the music was built up over the past 18 months, when her parents were separating. The pain and dislocation of that combined with the mix of dread and upheaval that was Covid Year Zero.

The response is music as the path to resolution but there is suffering to get there. I guess you could call it the Blues.

Give Me Time starts with gently strummed acoustic guitar. The voice is a soft fragile tenor which slowly takes off into the high peaks. She doesn’t overplay it.  A voice which sounds a little like Molly Tuttle. If I were only free/ Maybe I’d be stronger/ Maybe I’d be taller/ I live in a house ten feet tall. The song seems like a journey to a better place. It also shares something with George Harrison’s Give Me Love in the vamp.

On My Mind. I think I’ll stay here and I’d appreciate it if you’d stay too. The voice is unadorned and without affectations. The music is simple drone melodies with what I thought were spare electronic beats but maybe not.

Shade produced these songs mostly in her bedroom before some added polish. She plays guitar and with her James Fistonich and Max Earnshaw on guitar and bass, Angus Grainger drums. Maybe those beats are all analog.

Don’t Keep Driving and Home are all invested with this spirit of dreams opening out into wide vistas. The turbulence is all in the lyrics. Winds of change become a hurricane.

An impressive debut EP. The feel is of Big Open Country music. She was born in Canada but has lived most of her life in New Zealand. She can join the company of a select few ex-pat Canucks, like Tami Nielsen or Collette Rivers.

Rev Orange Peel      

Keeley Shade – Give Me Time EP Release Party

Sat May 29th, 2021
The Wine Cellar, Auckland
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