SPELLLING – Portrait of My Heart
On her ardent fourth album, SPELLLING's Chrystia Cabral channels and exudes a wild assortment of sonic influences, resulting in her most honest and entrancing record to date
Portrait of My Heart's opening, titular track is a symphonic lament soaked in the spindly shadow of late 70s goth rock, on which Chrystia Cabral expresses a purgatorial absence of belonging. The following tracks, Keep It Alive and Alibi, take from the seemingly discordant worlds of 80s hair metal/dad rock and Y2K Disney Channel pop-punk, combining them in a way that prods you between the eyebrows and demands you listen closely.
Then there are songs like Ammunition – an opera-rock ballad complete with searing, baroque guitar lines – which blow your preconceptions of this historically oblique and witchy artist completely out of the water. By the same token, certain left-of-centre avant-pop musical choices that are endemic of the classic SPELLLING sound still permeate the darker, heavier portions of this sonic reinvention – especially on tracks like Drain and Love Ray Eyes. The album ends with a fairly true-to-the-original cover of MBV’s Sometimes which substitutes the chuggy rhythm guitar for a mixture of spacious fuzz and warbly synths which afford Cabral’s sublime vocal the special attention it deserves.
Portrait of My Heart channels and exudes a wild assortment of sonic influences – an approach which results in the most honest and entrancing SPELLLING record to date.
Listen to: Alibi, Ammunition, Drain