Pacing — singer/songwriter Katie McTigue — has shared a new set of singles that combine her penchant for creating deceptively sardonic but emotionally gripping music. Titled Snake Facts the trio of songs reveals the EPs title is far from arbitrary or simply symbolic. Those familiar with McTigue’s social media will know she’s been dishing out memeified snake facts long before she started writing songs about them. Prior to that she released her debut mixtape Hatemail, a deeply cathartic submersion into Pacing’s self-loathing as a means of exposing the “mean voices in your lizard brain.”
But on Snake Facts, she explores, takes the form of, and imagines the varying perspectives of a different reptile. Across the three songs, Pacing mingles lilting country and folk into quietly moving meditations on herself through the prismatic lens of her favorite slithering creatures. The EP opens with “Rattlesnakes Aren’t Born With Rattles, Every Time They Shed It Adds On A Little Rattle Segment,” where McTigue ruminates forlornly about death and an inability (unlike snakes) to shed off all the parts of herself that plague her.
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“Dogs kill 6x as many people as snakes do in the US every year” attempts to dispel an irrational fear of snakes while also using it as a jumping-off point for staring down one’s own fears. Guided by McTigue’s warbling vocals and the jumpy strums of an acoustic guitar, she plays fast and loose with the humor to be derived from her knowingly absurd comparisons to snakes, yet that never downplays the poignant earnestness her music contains.
The final song on Snake Facts is “Snakes Are Really Good At Squeezing Into Small Spaces, Just Like The Rodents They Eat,” another upbeat acoustic piece that ends the EP on a buoyant note. Amidst the sonorous lulling of McTigue’s layered vocals and her quick tempo switch-ups, she drives home the hidden omnipresence of snakes in our lives while also romanticizing their need for solitude. As the track wanes into nothingness a voiceover starts by McTigue that attempts to give voice to the indifference snakes have for humans versus our hyperactive need to kill anything that scares us.
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Words: Steven Ward
Listen to Snake Facts the new set of singles from Pacing below!
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