Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Gush Review

by Shannon Smith

There are songs we play to fill a room. Others feel like they fill us. Gush begins in that second, sacred space as each performance but as presence. Even with only two tracks released, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has offered a doorway to somewhere creative and engaging.

“Gush” arrives with its building of analog sounds, elements of electronica, and a touch of ethereal. The layers grow, gathering in the hollows of the mind, dance beats leaking over the body, not to announce the need to dance, but to remind us it is truly a necessity. The intertwining textures feel aquatic, like a tide rising from within, full of mystery and the shimmer of forgotten dreams. Glitchy synths ripple like fish beneath ice, while a pulse, patient, steady and anchored with current. Her voice enters not as narrative but as invocation: layered, choral, translucent. She is not singing to us so much as with us.

There’s a sense that this music was never written, only remembered. It is as if these sonic strands were once part of us and are simply finding their way back to awaken the rhythms of the soul, and thus, the body must move in celebration.

Then comes “What’s Between Us,” and with it, a more tectonic 80s synth intro. This one builds, the vocals and vocal samples build like wind moving across an Atari generated dance floor. The organic synths and samples carving meaning. It pulses with the creative essence that floats between two people when there is more love than language can hold. Synth tones bloom like watercolors dropped into silence.

Smith’s gift is not in composing melodies that stick, but in creating spaces that stay. Her music is less about movement than it is about magnetism. She seems to capture how a tone can bend time in how a single harmony can open the window to an entire emotional horizon. These first offerings from Gush suggest an album built on resonance.

To those of us who carry our inner world like a half-lit chapel that is meant for delicate, sacred, dance, Smith’s music feels like a candle being lit inside it to express the pulse for the movement.

We wait for the full record, Gush, like one waits for the moon to rise. Not for answers, but for light soft enough to see ourselves dance by.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Website