Producing pastel-hued electronic mindscapes complete with jarring synths, Ontario artist Jessy Lanza moves through elegant audiovisual atmospheres.
Manipulating her vocals to enhance the instrumentation, she is almost happy to act as the backing singer in her own project. Moving with subtlety and finesse, focusing upon the soft feeling her slow-moving basslines underpin, Lanza whispers her lyrics with cute affectation.
‘Pull My Hair Back’, her 2013 debut, explored more minimalistic production techniques, with the more charged and intricate layering of its follow up inspired by the Japanese electro outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Playing out like a rediscovered animated film on VHS, her second LP radiates magic. It’s a fantastical romance that flickers and twinkles with forgotten innocence, but her music now also displays an almost brittle, non-directional pattern and a disjointed uneasiness drips from track to track.
It Means I Love You moves with a Shangaan electro bounce, while Lanza weaves inconsistencies into the rhythms, exploring jittery and scattered bass lines to eventually create and spread positivity.
Lanza’s feelings of anxiety are encapsulated by her lyrics. “I just want to impress you,” she sings on Going Somewhere. “Just say you love me.” On making the album, she said: “I became obsessed with surrounding myself with tropical plants. I've been convinced that the air quality in our house is slowly killing us. It might sound crazy, but the plants have made a huge difference."
This is music which bounces around cerebral hemispheres, popping with serotonin, charged with stimulating arpeggios. Lanza and co-producer Jeremy Greenspan have carefully built an album representative of who she is and how she thinks, one that rings out like a documentary filmed from behind her mind’s eye.
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
We don't run any advertising! Our editorial content is solely funded by lovely people like yourself using Stereoboard's listings when buying tickets for live events. To keep supporting us, next time you're looking for concert, festival, sport or theatre tickets, please search for "Stereoboard". It costs you nothing, you may find a better price than the usual outlets, and save yourself from waiting in an endless queue on Friday mornings as we list ALL available sellers!
.jpg)
