Boom boom ignite your heart
Kate Clover's nervy, formalist songs are primed for mass consumption. Who's ready?
2024 has been the Year of Kate Clover—for me, anyway. Back in April I caught her and her ace band at Cobra Lounge in Chicago, and her albums Bleed Your Heart Out (2022) and The Apocalypse Dream (2024) have enjoyed high-rotation frequency on the stereo. The Los Angeles-based Clover began releasing music a few years back, issuing the digi singles “When Will I Hold You Again” with Dion Lunadon in 2020, and a moody vamp through “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” with Warren Thomas and a rollicking if respectful cover of X’s “Your Phone’s off the Hook, But You’re Not” with her husband Brandon Welchez, both in 2022.
Clover recorded Bleed Your Heart Out in 2019 in Mexico City. “At a certain point in my life, I really needed something new,” she remarked earlier this year to Charlène Dosio. “I wanted to push my boundaries and find this freer version of myself. But in Los Angeles I couldn’t get out of my comfort zone. So I decided to leave everything behind and move to Mexico for a while. When I got there, I felt so free that I decided to stay and record an album.” Produced by Welchez, the album’s ten songs are kicked into gear by Clover’s then ad-hoc band of Welchez on bass and guitar, Johnny Otis Davilla on lead guitar, and Samantha Ambrosio Fulop on drums. (Davilla was on loan from the San Juan, P.R. band Davilla 666; Fulop co-owns the studio where Bleed Your Heart Out was recorded.) Relocating back to Los Angeles, Clover and Welchez gathered Jonah Falco on bass, David Field on drums, and Giuliano Scarfo on lead guitar to record the equally strong The Apocalypse Dream, with Falco producing. (When I caught Clover in Chicago, William Evans had replaced Welchez on bass.)
Clover and Welchez compose together—Clover writes the lyrics on her own—and their songs are tight, nervy, melodic, and utterly stuffed with hooks. Guitar-forward, backward-gazing for formal inspiration, build on a solid foundation of verse-chorus-verse, a Clover song is wholly out of fashion; haters, or anyway the bored, might decry her music’s traditional sound, easy to pigeonhole as late-1970s inspired Power Pop filtered through punk verve, and lament the lack of surprise or innovation. All I know is that that tradition feels endlessly renewable, inspiring to many who yearn to plug into its concise, dimensional sound and attitude, and a place where tales of contemporary life might be told. Clover’s best, most spirited songs steal me momentarily from the moment I’m inside of. Even within pop formalism, her songs make demands.
Clover said that The Apocalypse Dream was pruned down from more than thirty songs that she’d written during the Covid lockdown, and that some material originated in her attempt to write lyrics more openly. “I think sometimes, as a writer, if I’m blocked, all I can do is be honest,” she said to host Scott Saldinger at Almost Famous Magazine. “And so there’s always a well you can pull from. And I think if I did feel blocked, I would just allow myself to express what I felt in the moment.” In the past “it would be more poetic, and it would be more of a metaphor, but this time, I sort of allowed myself to just put pen to paper. And I think that people get a little shy to do that, or they don’t respect it as much, but if you’re telling the truth there's nothing wrong.” She added, “It was therapeutic to just allow myself to write in a moment exactly how I felt, and I had never really done that before. For whatever reason, maybe if I felt a certain way I wouldn’t turn to songwriting in that moment as an impulse, and this time, writing these songs, I allowed that, which was a good exercise.” Being vulnerable, “you know, you can’t think about it. You just have to just let it go.”
Clover remarked to Fifteen Questions that her lyrics “typically [come] last for me. They grow from a melody and the mood of music. Sometimes they come first but that’s rare.” She added, “They often take a little bit of time to figure out.” “Best case scenario, an idea comes and it’s overwhelming, fighting for life to get out,” she explained at LA Groupie. “So you sit down, and it just appears. That’s what you wish for every time, but that’s not possible every moment. There are times where you’ll find a fraction of inspiration, and base everything else around that. But that’s a little bit harder. I do try to write as much as I can, because with that, you get better at choosing your ideas…I don’t know sometimes, but I think that practicing only makes that decision making stronger. Every creative mind works differently.”
However her lyrics arrive, as idea-abstractions set to music or as a response to melody and changes, they are, belted out by Clover, as urgent a delivery mode as any instrument in her charging band. She has a very appealing affect—I don’t know if it’s a Southern California thing—on words like “reason” and “treason,” which sound like “reas-awn” and “treas-awn”coming out of her mouth, an edgy, urban, Girl Group throwback that feels in her voice utterly current.
Three songs from her debut, “Love You To Death,” “Pleasure Forever,” and “Daisy Cutter,” haven’t stopped playing in my head since the summer.
Clover’s gleaming hooks are pressure-washed by her band’s fiery playing, and ricochet and fly about with abandon. “Love You to Death” is, as the title suggests, about adoration leavened with obsession, that old story. Things begin with smiling ascending chords, and as the band comes crashing in on the fifth bar Clover’s “Oh-oh-oh” immediately calls to my mind the full-throated charms of the sadly departed Rachel Nagy of the Detroit Cobras and also, in the instant, Nagy’s favorite records, and early Debbie Harry and her favorite records, and so on back to the birth of pop music—moments so eternal as to be thrillingly present as Clover sings “I’m-a wrap my arms around you / so I know you’ll always be true.” She admits that she wants to feel their last breath on her skin, and that it might be too late if she waits any longer—you can virtually see the the lead guitarist head nod at these confessions—but any darkness or menace is subsumed by a gorgeous two-bar “Oh-oh-oh” that drops us in the sun filled room of the chorus. The bridge, as a good bridge does, complicates things further— “If I can’t have you / then no one gets to…”—before the chorus cheers things up again, enough so that we happily ignore, or dance on top of, the even darker stuff in the third verse (“…as the final kiss turns cold.”) It’s what a great rock and roll song does.
Clover urges us to hop onto “Pleasure Forever” before the gallop gets too fast for us to gain purchase. Again she’s singing about desire and time-ticking, about wanting but having to wait but no longer denying anything. The tension explodes in the exultant chorus: “I want it now!” she wails, her eyes shut tight against the craving, and it’s impossible to know whether Clover brought that demand to the song she wrote to express it, or whether the song, arriving in urgent, syncopated chords, demanded she sing something in response to it. Watching her belt out the chorus onstage is a thrill, and makes any pondering of cause-and-effect moot.
Clover’s often cited early L.A. and New York City punk bands as influences. Those those unruly sources aren’t immediately apparent in her melody-driven songs beyond their barreling pace and more-pressure-per-square-inch arrangements, and in Clover’s “tough broad” delivery, yet in a song like “Daisy Cutter,” video below, troubled seams are visible. She’s singing about a troubled love affair, I think, or anyway an emotional terrain where a battle’s broken out; you trip over words and phrases like “shellshocked,” “DOA,” a “napalm-filled bouquet,” a “kamikaze mission,” “treasons and fury”—and that’s only the first verse! The band brings the song directly into the front lines. The chorus, set up by the line “Grenade aimed to hit an exact mark,” is one of the best that I’ve heard in a long time. As the guitarists flex and churn their chords, Clover sings, simply and brutally, “Obliterate my heart.” That alarming demand, or plea, arrives straight from a desire to mess up something pretty, to wrench the wheel away from cliche, to surprise with a truth that feels as if it came from out of nowhere until you realize it’s what the song’s about and why it’s here and you’re turning it up.
Can I say write a smile “Vintage Kate Clover” after only two albums? She continues her charge with this year’s terrific The Apocalypse Dream, where unrest bubbles to the surface. She’s been candid in interviews about the more personal nature of the record, and tunes like “Damage Control” and “Here Comes the Love Bomb” allow dysfunction and messiness to throw elbows inside of the traditional pop forms. “Damage Control” with its metaphors of reckless driving and aimless wanderings arrives as a lilting, mid-paced Records/Blondie-styled singalong with another killer chorus—the plaintively sung title phrase—nostalgia for a misspent past made bittersweet.
“Here Comes the Love Bomb,” below, is played a bit faster, but with a tic, the melody anxious, looking for a place to rest. The lyrics hint at more hi-octane troubles—there’s a heart torn apart, thoughts annihilated, an image of napalm, another fuse, as was warned about in “Daisy Cutter”—but then the chorus arrives and, as in so many of Clover’s best songs, the sun comes out. She again chooses to sing only the title phrase; truth be told, as elated as Clover’s most stirring choruses are, they tend toward repetition over the course of the album, predictable in their insistence on honoring only the song’s title phrases. But that’s hardly an issue here because belting out “here comes the love bomb” at a show, in your car, is so fun and silly that you wish the chorus would come around more often than it does.
In “Follow Your Heart,” the final track on her debut, Clover sings about someone on welfare buying her a cheap drink and someone else offering her gold, but she’s “invested into this instead.” This? A romantic relationship bending under the pressures of shitty finances—“Been told that love can’t pay the rent / They’re right, ‘cause we don’t have a cent,” she sings knowingly—or her art? The track opens as a widescreen Western—with requisite dusty harmonica and Sergio Leone guitar twangs—so we know just how old the dilemma is, and ends with an enthusiastic crowd cheering as Clover kindly thanks them.
It’s a canned bit, and affecting. And I can’t hear it without wondering on the levels of success that musicians covet, some hoping against hope for Billie Eilish-level fame, their songs on streaming playlists in thousands of mid-list sports bars, others for simply a self-sustaining model that allows them to face writing rent checks without fear and dread. “Followed my heart to the poor house, where nothing is for free,” Clover sweetly sings in yet another poignant chorus. With two wonderful, tuneful, urgent, dare I say radio-friendly albums behind her, plenty of press, and a highly polished and photogenic image and sartorial style, Clover seems poised for breakout success. Yet how many times have I felt that about the artists I love, only to catch them the next time they’re through my town at the same cozy club, the joint’s low ceiling both a fact and a metaphor? I wish for Kate Clover and her band nothing but success, however they’re blessed by luck or determined by hard knocks to define it. Her songs are ready. Who’s listening?
Top photograph ©Joe Bonomo
Sounds good to me! Daisy Cutter gave me some Ramones vibes whereas Love Bomb almost sounds like a Go-Gos song with a little more edge - really like the guitar solo at the end. Thanks for posting this!