Kate Vargas – Golden Hour in the House of Lugosi (Mother West)

There’s always been a streak of theatrical grit in Kate Vargas’s music, emphasised by a taste for the surreal, the Southern Gothic, the seen-it-all-before drawl. Across the eleven restless tracks on Golden Hour in the House of Lugosi, she blends jazz touched textures, rock and roll swagger, and off kilter ballads. Where her last album Rumpumpo flirted with glamourised chaos, this one builds a house inside it.

Raised in Albuquerque, trained at Berklee, and based in New York, Vargas slips between rootsy rocker, cabaret conjuror, and spellbinding storyteller. She is comfortable with the craft of songwriting wrapped in emotional, structural, and sonic disorder. Her collaborations, and previous albums including For the Wolfish and Wandering and Strangeclaw, have each revealed new layers to her character driven approach. That sense of shape shifting continues here with an album title, Golden Hour in the House of Lugosi, which references both Bela Lugosi, the original Dracula, and Vargas’s own desire for glamour, illusion, and transformation. As she sings in Rosy: “Color me Bela Lugosi / I’m longing to be in that castle in the air.”

Opener Downtown has a slow, percussive build with sung – spoken vocals that tumble forward with breathless urgency. The beat lurches and sways, echoing Tom Waits in words, and the junkyard percussion sounds, but with a feminine edge of warning: “I told you to take me downtown, baby — are you listening now?” That balance of chaos and control recurs throughout the album. I Once Was a Contender is slow and jazzy, each line drawn out with theatrical resignation, like a fallen pageant queen waltzing past, oblivious to others judgement.

Little Miss Holy Holy plays like classic rock and roll, while Hollow Tree grabs your attention with a fast-talking incantation that lists “car tire, chicken wire, holy water, hell fires” with conspiratorial glee.

There is a physicality and danger to these songs. References to locks, knives, keys, and bones are matched by production choices that build tension, then allow release, at least temporarily. The ominous Nothing Turns My Lock is bass driven, with a steady, sultry groove made more mysterious by whistling. Serrated Knife charges in with garage rock swagger, slows to let the words cut, then flares again with solos and rhythmic shifts. These arrangements are enhanced by Vargas’s vocal style: part spoken confessional, part backroom preacher, and part rogue jazz singer.

The closing tracks explore softer terrain. Shower Me With Infinite Light is delicate and drifting, but its picked guitar and hushed vocals create an atmosphere of unease more than comfort. Lady Adore is sparse and tense, while Victorio, the album’s longest song, journeys through shifting rhythms and moods, where the title is returned to as a meditation or anchor.

Throughout the album there is Vargas’s sense of character and story. Many of these songs feel inhabited: by former lovers, failed saints, wounded healers, and women performing for an audience that may no longer be watching. The Golden Hour here is not so much a time of perfect light, it is the moment just before things fade, fall apart, or we have a glimpse of a truer version of ourselves. And the House of Lugosi nods to the artifice we inhabit in order to live or find ourselves trapped in.

Golden Hour in the House of Lugosi is rich in mood, steeped in mystery, and threaded with a performer’s instinct to both reveal and withhold, always leaving us slightly unsure what will come next. With it Vargas invites us into her haunted house of song, offers us a drink, and dares us to stay past sunset.

John Bradbury

Golden Hour in the House of Lugosi is out now

John Bradbury
Latest posts by John Bradbury (see all)