Album Review: Katie Gavin - What A Relief
And it is the name of a playlist that Hanif Abdurraqib assembled, and shared, near the top of 2022—and it is a sentiment, I think, that I perhaps always understood, or at least came to have a better understanding of in the last four or five years. And it would have been a little over two years ago when I was giving consideration to how I wished to write about the self-titled album from the trio Muna —an album that is, often, very fun, and wishes that us, as listeners, will have fun along with it as we experience it, but it is also an album that is, at times, extremely thoughtful and courses with deeply resonant emotion. It isn’t sad—well, I don’t think that it is intended to be sad. There is, as there often is, in contemporary popular music, a few rather devastating songs tucked in near the conclusion. What I am getting at here, already becoming a little weighed down with ambition in my approach, and so I do apologize, is the song “Kind of Girl”—mid-tempo, country adjacent in its