Our Daily Bread 608: Elea Calvet ‘Sinuous Ways’
January 29, 2024
SINGLE REVEAL – DOMINIC VALVONA
Elea Calvet ‘Sinuous Ways’
(Hyssop & Victoria Records)
With an intelligence and subtlety sadly lacking in much music these days, the Bristol-based (born in Canada and brought up for a time in India) worldly artist Elea Calvet reflects the sinuous of her latest single with a winding, pondered and almost sighed adroit wistfulness. A still piano, bowed and softly thumping bass with tremolo quivers and delightful wisp of melodious beauty, the duality of the human soul is laid bare to a most accentuated backing and feely atmosphere. There’s a real clever alchemy of lyricism, and a balance struck between the sorrowful and beautifully drifting, the bluesy and folksy, classical and wispy. Torment reigns all right, but the near haunting float-y but always present voice and music is as alluring as it is clever and deep: and again, that duality, somehow wafting along almost effortlessly.
A burgeoning star until a hiatus, Elea Calvet has been constantly compared to such idiosyncratic stars as Anna Calvi – and for good reason. But she reminded me of Raf Mantelli, a touch of our very own one-time collaborator and fellow Canadian, Gillian Stone, Amanda Acevado, and a more disarming Diamanda Galas. Songwriting and orchestration wise, I swear I’m hearing a touch of Bowie too!
This is vulnerability and strength heading in an intriguing, interesting and artful direction. I look forward to hearing more, with a full EP in March.
Our Daily Bread 308: Beauty Stab ‘O Eden’
March 8, 2019
Single Review: Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Beauty Stab ‘O Eden’
(Metal Postcard Records) 8th March 2019
So this is the debut single from the new pop duo Beauty Stab; a duo that has the talent to bring some excitement, sleaze and glamour into what the staid machine of the music industry has become. Words cannot do justice to just how good this single and two B- sides are, well actually I will call it triple A-sides as the two extras are equally as special as the triumph that is the lead off track, ‘O Eden’.
So I will start with ‘O Eden’ a song that is the closest we will get to the Walker Brothers this year or any other year. Dan Shea is probably the finest pop singer in pop today, he has the melodrama the heart and bedsit seediness that has not been heard in pop since the golden days of Soft Cell, he has the same qualities as the early 70s Bowie: The “I am a pop master you are just pretenders; sit back and see how it really should be done”.
‘O Eden’ is plainly just a beautifully written pop swoon of a ballad, if when the chorus sweeps in, if it doesn’t bring a tear to your eye and a lump to your throat you should get someone to check your pulse to see if you are still in the land of the living. Majestic is the word.
The second track ‘Need You Around’, sang by another member of Beauty Stab, the pop pinup in waiting Buddy Miller, is a song again blessed with a otherworldly beauty that you just do not sadly, very often, hear in pop today; part Blur’s ‘To The End’ sang by a young Morrissey in his Smiths days, bathed in echo, it is a drop dead beaut of a song, and when a new duo has two such fine singers, haunting is the word.
The third track ‘Clothes’ shows the other side to the mighty Beauty Stab, the sleazy sordid side. This is all Bowie Scary Monsters guitars Walker Brothers Nite Flights darkness: “Your girlfriends clothes looks better on me, your skin looks better on my skin”. A song with so much cut dead gutter sex it is dangerous. Raunchy in a word.
So the words majestic, haunting, and raunchy have all been used in describing this three-track single perfectly. I would also like to add, Major record labels get your cheque books out, I think there might be a bit of a bidding war on.
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