“Soliloquy” EP by Kimberlye Gold
The right vocalist can do a lot for any record, but when it comes to an EP like Soliloquy, it’s what makes the EP’s five unique songs near-perfect listens. Kimberlye Gold has been active in the underground for well over a decade (almost two, in fact), and when listening to her singing style in any of the material on Soliloquy, her experience bleeds into most every melody rather seamlessly. She neither sounds spent nor tired of the studio game in this set of performances - she instead sounds energized by her current place in the hierarchy of indie pop, which is more than I can say for a lot of artists in the industry right now.
I love the way the rhythm presses us closer to the vocal in “A Place in Your Heart” and “How Can I Be Sure,” but at no time does the tempo of the music ever sound urgent to the degree of feeling rushed or thrown together. If anything, all of this content has a deliberate tone that makes me think it wasn’t recorded in haste at all; rather than spending her time in development, it seems like Gold was chomping at the bit and willing to iron things out as she recorded them (which is a hallmark of all the greats, when you think about it).
Despite the overall fluidity of this extended play, and despite including a cover of The Young Rascals’ “How Can I Be Sure”, “The Right Kind of No” presents a wonderful contrast reminding people that Kimberlye Gold is not a one-note songwriter at all. Her multidimensionality behind the mic is complemented by her dexterity as an instrumentalist - and specifically being an inventive musician and composer of melodies - and although this is only a five-song EP, it never sounds like anything less than a full-length, standard studio album in my view.
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/album/2Jnu90sYyOMj4msSkI9Ysx
In addition to the layered look of the previously mentioned “How Can I Be Sure” and Soliloquy’s opener “A Place in Your Heart,” there’s a general versatility to the attack Gold is employing across the whole of this extended play that shows me how much she’s grown into the sound we’re appreciating in these performances today. Good things take time, and in this particular genre, I think the independent market reiterates the authenticity of this statement with every passing year. Hence the non-rushed approach this artist took, and the undisputed sonic gold that it managed to yield at the end of the day.
I haven’t always been the biggest fan of the singer/songwriter genre, and some colleagues have told me I’m pretty hard to please when it comes to talent like this, but a player like Kimberlye Gold is just too easy to fall in love with when she’s playing material like that in Soliloquy. It feels like it’s coming from the heart, and while I’m reticent to anoint her the next big thing in this style, she’s got enough melodic moxie for me to believe that she’s going to be a fixture in the next wave of important pop to reach the modern mainstream.
Anne Hollister
Anne Hollister
We do music reviews for Independent Artists and Publicists.
