Kate Peterson - Undone

Overall Rating: 4


You can go to almost any coffee house in any city in the United States and see a "singer-songwriter" performing songs interchangeable with someone at the next coffee house. Kate Peterson's record Undone is a perfect exemplification of this; she is the cliched open mic performer. These aren't terrible songs - they seem heartfelt, and Peterson is a competent musician. They are simply too plain to grab one's attention. There is hardly a melody on this record that I can remember.

Maybe it's the limited instrumentation that makes this record feel so tiresome. Of the few tracks that stick out, "Songbirds," offers the listener a string section and a guitar (that's a start, at least). The production, however, makes Undone seem all the more like a performance by a throwaway singer-songwriter. When this little bit of diversity does appear, the guitar is still foregrounded in the mix, making whatever cello or violin that may be there either unnoticeable or sloppy sounding, as in the track "What's Left." I mean, throw a banjo in there, or something different. If the song writing is so forgettable, some diverse arrangement might hold the listener's interest.

This insipid quality is only cemented by the song selection. Employing one of those standard coffee house tricks of the trade, Peterson starts with some slow songs, throws a few fast ones in there, then another couple slow songs, and ends with a raucous toe-tapper (which actually isn't half-bad, and would be worth a second listen if it wasn't presented in the almost parodic fashion that it is). It would, in fact, feel diverse if it wasn't for that open mic songwriting flavor that sticks to the roof of your ear's mouth.

The worst aspect of Undone is the lyrical content. Especially as a singer-songwriter (emphasis on "writer"), if the lyrics are as weak as Peterson's, it is a recipe for disaster. The sub-par, sub-soulful vocal performance doesn't help. Occasionally Peterson will offer a line worded with relatively clever diction: "She picks a flower and pulls the pedals one by one / they fall like poetry, slowly coming undone." But yes, even here the imagery is stale and "petal" is misspelled or misprinted on the album's lyric insert (or maybe this is Peterson's fresh take on a post-industrial world overtaken by technology wherein nature is comprised of spare car parts, the remnants of Detroit's once glorious apotheosis? Somehow I doubt it). Overall, each song is addressed, in the familiar fashion, to a straw man, a "you" the listener will never know or care about because there is nothing lyrically worth paying attention to about this "you". Once in a while Peterson's words will even dip into an almost comical nonsense, as in the appropriately titled "Splinter": "You got a splinter in your brain / And it's driving you insane / Don't let it make you mad / Poking at the things you once had." Huh?

It is probably not a good sign that as I listened to this record more, and paid closer attention to its content, my contempt for it grew. Perhaps it is unfair to hold every performer to the standards of Arbor/Ypsi's vanguard of comparable performers like the Misty Lyns, Palmers, Powers, et al, but I guess that's what makes us lucky. But if you are a fan of things ubiquitous, Undone just might be for you.