On reflection, the way we (and when I say we, I mean lazy journalists… not me, other lazy journalists) like to package music, film, literature, art in general, up in neat little bundles and call them genres. Labels such as indie or rock, romance or horror abound. But life doesn’t work like that, does it? We don’t move through our days as if conforming to a single genre; life is a swirling blend of all tags and labels, an ebb and flow of mood, pace, thoughts, and events.
Olina is one of those artists whose music is the epitome of the pointlessness of such demarcations, not just moving through many styles across the five songs that make up By The Book but also delivering lyrics which shift effortlessly between sincerity and sarcasm, humour and seriousness, which are pointed, poignant, and poetic at a turn.
If “Newspaper Smell,” a song that explores the strangeness of new surroundings, is a punchy and driven slice of indie, albeit one that makes brilliant use of dynamic range, “Tug of War,” which follows, is forged of folk finesse and ambient sonics.
“Smithereens” seems to take the best of both those styles and merges them into a thing of deftness and drive and delicacy, “Sadist” inhabits a beguiling and dissarming dreamstate, and “Let Her Lie” again, is impossible to put a label on, feeling like the modern successor of the chasson, one that seems to get more coiled and confusing, in a good way, as it goes.
Genres, tags, pigeonholes, labels, and the like are functional handles, but I suggest that anything that can be summed up in one word or phrase probably isn’t doing anything new, which is precisely why Olina and her music so readily defy their application.
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