Click album cover to purchase at Bandcamp.

The lazy blogger in me wants to immediately throw Katie Kate into the suddenly ubiquitous White Girl Swag Rapper category. To do so, however, would not only be grossly inaccurate, but also majorly unfair to the artist. While Katie is (at times) guilty of parroting a steez that borders on the racially offensive, her style of electro-infused, party-oriented brag rap is ultimately a valuable addition to the Seattle rap scene, a mostly male-dominated expanse criminally devoid of female voices in general.

In the local context, Katie is the feminine answer to Mad Rad. The two acts incidentally share a label home at Out For Stardom, as well as a similar fundamental identity: that of the emotionally tormented (exhausted?) seven-days-a-week party purveyor. On Flatland, Katie Kate’s debut album, the MC/singer/producer makes it perfectly clear that she has problems and that the absolute best way to deal with them is to dance and sing her way through the strife.

On “Totebag” Katie fills a proverbial knapsack with emotional remnants from past loves, both tragically good and bad. A well-executed flip of those killer chimes from The Brothers Johnson’s “Strawberry Letter 23” is like a bittersweet sprinkle of stardust over the track’s synth-laden thump. Most of Flatland’s ten tracks are similarly charming exercises in rudimentary beatmaking. Katie employs a learned appreciation for bare-knuckle 808 knock and the endless array of effects at her synthesized disposal. The best example is “Hunting,” an industrial-grade dance workout that finds Katie on the prowl; it’s here that she’s at her most charming, toying with her sonic creation with deft switches between rapping and singing. Unfortunately she does neither exceptionally well…yet. Her attempt at lyrical miracles on “Uh.. No” leaves much to be desired and “Bodyout Princess” (an inane declaration of the artist’s unique identity and perhaps formal unveiling of the Official Katie Kate Tagline) is simply too far out-of-bounds for her, vocally.

Still, there’s much promising on Flatland. Katie, like the best electro-pop artists, is capable of finding the fleeting humanity within electronic music’s artificial constructs. Whether it’s the lovely reserve of her singing on “Houses” or the playful yet astute romantic observations on the echoing “Constellations,” a significant swath of Seattle’s music-loving populace can relate to Katie Kate’s point-of-view, and for this reason Flatland is an invaluable entry to the game. In a post-genre musical world like today, where some folks find themselves stumbling through (the grumpy rap purist set) and others drift seamlessly between genre amalgams (the wide-eyed youngsters), it’s mad scientist artists like Katie Kate who have the most to gain and the least to lose.