Katie Cruel - City City
- by Rich Morris Release Date:2013-08-15 Label: Self released

Katie Cruel's music mixes angry-lady singer-songwriter snarl and smoulder (think PJ Harvey or Anna Calvi) with a bit of latter-day Depeche Mode industrial clankiness. Which means that the production, blending smoking, bluesy guitar twangs with sparse, doomy percussion, is pretty great. Unfortunately, there's not much of a song underneath it all, just a well put-together sulk. Katie needs some punchier material to put her name on the map.
On the 'flip', as nobody says these days, we have a couple of decent remixes by Timo Maas and Santos. Oddly, these are mostly straight-ahead house affairs, which makes you wonder who Katie's demographic is. Strange.