Dora Bleu - Earthly Bombs (Ikuisuus)

In today’s musical climate of regression and huge-fonted neon infantilism, where even the more esoteric labels are trying to put forth vapid beats to please and increasingly ADD audience you have to despair if you’re a music fan with any degree of patience and focus. Luckily the independent composer will never die, and Dora Bleu ’s latest CD-R, Earthly Bombs stands in direct opposition to the fast-food market of ipod-commercial-ready bands.

One is struck immediately by the timbral similarities to Montreal based acts like Molasses , Godspeed and A Silver Mt. Zion . As the lineup includes Alien8/Constellation stalwarts Alexandre St-Onge and Sam Shalabi this is not surprising. The band, including at times Gordon Allen on trumpet, adorns main singer/songwriter Dora Bleu’s sparse dirges with well placed nocturnal soundscapes that hang on the branches of song like strange and intricate fruit. Dora herself has a style not immediately accessible, each song is a darkly swelling fantasy that evokes decay, snowscapes, nightmares.. all with a distinct painterly brush of voice and sparse guitar picking. There are less folk/rock referents at work here than early 20th century avant-garde elements. Bits of Pierrot Lunaire era Schoenberg , John Cage , Webern -style pointillism all brush the album with a patina of art-deco mystery. Though individual songs like “Silence” and “Real Prisons” burn slowly with incredible depth and character, the album is one that should be taken as a whole.. the striations and aural signposts are fluid and constant throughout, the landscape unfolding gradually at a slow pace.

Not generally a fan of female falsetto, here I felt like Dora’s singing is perfectly situated. Unhurried and dark without being murky, her vocals and spartan lyrics are themselves beautiful and evocative. To me they carry traces of early Yiddish singing, perhaps the modality and the falsetto point to that, but there is also the quietly yearning striations of the songs that have no clear beginning or end which draws from a musical well far older than the Western paradigm. A darkly exquisite majesty of song and landscape.

http://www.myspace.com/dorableu