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EXCLUSIVE NEW DOWNLOAD: Zola Jesus - Last Day + Sea Talk

Posted 12/5/2008 1:05 PM by Kev Kharas

Tags: Rock, 80s Pop, No-Wave, Noise, MOR

Remember when Scarlett Johansson put out a record? No tragedy by any means, if memory serves me right, but it did all seem a bit dismally comfortable in the end, what with David Bowie’s dad-like presence and Dave Sitek’s tendency to wrap the actress’s throat in so much layered sound she may as well’ve been singing through a scarf. Now, imagine if Anywhere I Lay My Head had been produced by U.S. Girls’ Megan Remy and featured a singer raised on arias and no-wave. Struggling? Try jamming “Last Day” – running barely beyond a minute, it’s a shotgun funeral of a song. “Sea Talk”, meanwhile, marries depth charging bass with delicately keyed ephemera in the same way that Telepathe do on next year’s Dance Mother LP – but instead of Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais coolly recounting forest-bound death f*cks, there is singer Nika, with swollen heart melodrama. Evoking all manner of things – cigarettes in the rain and the lost glamour of old Europe; Toto and Suicide – Zola Jesus conjure cinema from the longing of lo-fi sounds for more expensive fidelity, Nika breathing sweet everythings through the mist into your cold, undeserving ears.

Sounds Like: Nite Jewel, the 1980s, The Hospitals

Zola Jesus - Last Day

Zola Jesus - Sea Talk

Zola Jesus' RCRD LBL Page

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