Track Of The Day ALEESHA DIBBS
Long dynamic player of the Australian independent music scene as a session musician, collaborator or band frontwoman (Dive Bell, Prudence, Lorelei, Double Vision, Mvlholland, Lisa Mitchell, Angus and Julia Stone), for Sidney multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter Aleesha Dibbs time has come to unveil her venture as a solo artist through the upcoming release of her debut EP “Paradise Lost”, soundtracks a process of transformation and self-actualisation.
Contrary to the innumerable, seductive, and feel-good narratives being volleyed at us, “Paradise Lost” challenges the expectation that change and growth are supposed to feel good. We make difficult decisions in desperate circumstances and stride forward with an expectation that small celebrations of hope and agency will hold our hands and carry the weight of the phantom limbs that never leave us.
Produced and engineered by Tom Crandles (DMA’s, Prudence, AURA) and mixed by Kim Moyes (The Presets), “Paradise Lost” turns from more algorithmically-engineered honey traps, and instead chooses to stare down the demons that cling to us in spite of our best efforts.
As always in Aleesha‘s music the immersive atmosphere and heartfelt emotions are in the foreground, and the first foretaste, “Battalion”, is no exception, laced with poetic lyrics that confess doubt, dread, and regret whilst steadfastly emerging from a hard life change.
Likewise the recent ‘Avant Pop’ or possibly “Art Rock” productions with Cradle’s Prudence, it’s a heady and intricate concoction of different sonic elements, crafted with both synthetic and organic instrumentation, hard-to-pindown, that unfurls, through slow industrialized heavy rhythms, buzzing and mesmerizing arrangements, and a persuasive shape-shifting voice, over a dark, oppressive and painful wander into the most unfathomable emotive dimensions of the unconscious, between precipices of perdition and hopes of redemption.
Soft piano keys and pensive angelic vocals teeter between harmony and distortion, ecstasy and chaos, drenched in thick insidious darkness and uneasy splendour, whilst an obsessive, glacial and clanking mechanical percussive pattern rolls and thuds beneath a sizzling and churning bed of abrasive droning guitar textures, swishing fluttering FXs, whirlwinds of achingly high-pitched jarring turmoil and trumpet-like freeing poignant blowing flows, on which meander beautifully emotional nuances of layered vocalizations, varying from dreamy and powerful, to hardened and fragile, echoing mercurial moods of fear and angst through a claustrophobic surge of uncertain destiny.
Keep up with Aleesha Dibbs:
