Kitty Craft @ Sonia 10/22

Photography by Liana Snow

Review by Kainat Deo

“Would you guys consider this Boston or Cambridge?”

Pamela Valfer, better known by her stage name Kitty Craft, kicked off her first East Coast tour in what the crowd resoundingly clarified to be “Boston!” on Wednesday night, delivering an interactive, whimsical, and warm performance at Sonia (which is really in Cambridge). Throughout the evening, Valfer engaged with the audience as if the event were an intimate gathering among friends, responding playfully to the exclamations of show-goers during tuning breaks following every song.

Valfer, a former visual arts professor, included a backdrop for her performance: a projector screen that displayed quirky artistic visuals, rotating in a manner unique to her songs. Personified suns danced with the clouds. Kaleidoscopic montages flashed. Bubbles floated across the screen. Geometric figures chased each other in circles. Kitty Craft’s multi-faceted performance fostered an attentive atmosphere, the audience enchanted by stimulation of the senses from diverse angles.

The show began with “Inward Jam,” from Kitty Craft’s first release and crowd favorite, “Beats and Breaks from the Flower Patch.” In interviews, Valfer has revealed that listeners oftentimes describe “Beats and Breaks” as a “summer wind,” understandable given that the album’s instrumentation carries a nostalgic and warm texture, and the breathy vocalization inspires an ethereal listening experience. However, contrary to this external perception, Valfer expresses that while writing tracks from the release, she personally was in a situation of tedium and ennui, working a full time job and doing music on the side. Despite much of Kitty Craft’s musicality being conducive to feelings of happiness, much of her lyricism is fairly plaintive. These two ends of a spectrum, rather than fighting for representation, come together to create an underlying theme of hope that is intricately woven into Valfer’s music. 

“What you guys don’t realize, is that you guys give me more than I give you.”

Expressing gratitude for the space and time in which the performance took place, Valfer jumped around her discography, eventually landing on “At the Charity Stripe,” from her 2000 release “Catskills.” The song’s heartbeat is rooted in darker, trip-hop adjacent rhythms,coupled with full-bodied electronic and acoustic elements drawn from Kitty Craft’s signature indie sound. Valfer told the crowd that when writing the song, she was in her “era of huge basketball references.” Cleverly speaking to tense times and conflict-inducing life experiences through the metaphor of basketball, the songs lyrics are as follows: “Rebounds fly / Lost my footing and now it’s time / I’m back at the charity stripe.”

About halfway through  her hour-long set, Valfer delivered a cover of “Androgynous” by The Replacements, expressing her perspective that the song feels much more relevant to the world today compared to the world it was written in. Raw and unfiltered, Valfer sang with unwavering attention to the plucks of her guitar strings, a fully acoustic remake.

An ostensible end to the show came with the performance of “Alright,” an uplifting, reassuring track from “Beats and Breaks.” Chants of “it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright” reverberated throughout the venue, bodies swayed in unison, and minds lent themselves to the creation of an atmosphere rooted in hope. As the song concluded and Valfer gracefully slunk from the stage, the audience, hopeful for an encore, began a chant that is perhaps only sensible for a Kitty Craft show: “Meow! Meow! Meow! One more song!”

“This room sounds like a box of feral cats.”

Kitty Craft reemerged with the generous deliverance of a three-song encore, performing an acoustic, self-described “naked,” version of her 2024 EP’s title track “I Got Rulez.” Sending the audience on an emotional rollercoaster, she then pivoted to “Sway,” from her most recent release, a 2025 EP titled “Bits + Bobs From The Flower Patch Vol. II.” Upon listening to the studio-released version of the song, it is closely consistent with Kitty Craft’s softer sounds, however, Valfer described the song to be “as funky as Kitty Craft gets. Nobody else will understand this when I say it, but it feels Prince-like.” 

Valfer closed the show with “17 Is Such a Drag,” from her 2020 album “Lost Tapes.” The song itself is kittenish, boasting a faster tempo, danceable rhythm, and an interactive, laughter-filled performance. As the ending moments of the evening approached, the venue was abuzz with the eyes-closed, smile-on-the-face swaying of showgoers. As she prepared to leave the stage, Valfer held her heart as she expressed that Boston had been a “soft place to fall.”

“I couldn’t have asked for a better opening night.”