Kendra Amalie

The Beyond Beyond is Beyond debut from Kendra Amalia is a multi-headed monster of guitar, shifting styles as needed from pointilliste string runs with a metallic bite to soft-hearted country ramble. She dabbles with indie-psych, but more often than not, Amalie lays back into the bed of fingerpicked folk. The guitarist has created several offerings in her own name, though this remains the most polished. She’s worked with Wisconsin outfits Eleven Eleven, Names Divine, and Guitar Hell over the years and remains a fixture of the state’s scene. Intuition, however, is the sound of Amalie breaking forward into her own form. The patchwork approach works in her favor as a nuanced spread of her talent, and while sometimes the seams show, she makes it all fit together into a fairly ornate tapestry.

At its core Intuition sounds like an artist finding her brightest beams while still leaving room to experiment, always rolling away from being pinned down. That said, there are a couple of songs that seem to embody the light more than others. Corralling her fingerpicked prowess alongside a slow simmer vocal that’s just shy of Espers territory on “Stay Low,” Amalie adds in the pained cry of slide guitar and the song becomes a vital pivot point for the album. Likewise, the airy, haunted ripple of “Become the Light” fashions her heavier psych into a stunning explosion of folk put through the fire. With songs like these in her roster it seems only certain that she’ll work alchemical magic to craft an album that rides powerful winds of anguish and awe. Intuition will quite likely wind up the spark that lights the fuse.

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