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Lotte Kestner-The Bluebird Of Happiness-(SMR022)-CD-FLAC-2013-SHGZ
Description :
Artist..: Lotte Kestner
Album…: The Bluebird Of Happiness
GENRE….: Indie
STYLE….: Pop, Folk, World, & Country
LABEL….: Saint Marie SCENE…..: 2015-02-01
BITRATE..: 574 kbps avg STORE…..: 2013-03-15
ENCODER..: FLAC 1.2.1 -8 -V TRACKS….: 12
SIZE…..: 196.9MB SOURCE….: CD
URL..: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna-Lynne_Williams
– TRACKLIST
1 String 3:27
2 Wrestler 4:32
3 The Bluebird Of Happiness 4:33
4 Turn The Wolves 4:58
5 Pairs 3:45
6 Invention 3:42
7 Halo 4:29
8 Sweetheart 3:10
9 When It’s Time 3:37
10 Eggshell 2:51
11 Cliff 3:50
12 Little Things 4:45
Total Playtime: 47:39
When a relatively unknown name strikes out on their own apart from their
bandmates, the stage is set for what usually ends up as a more experimental
shift. Understandably, the solo album is a template for the creative juices
that couldn’t fit within the frames of the band’s construct. Personal
interests and tendencies seep in, and you’re left with a clearer picture of
the artist by themselves, unobstructed apart from compromise or settling.
This is what makes Anne-Lynne Williams’s [stagename: Lotte Kestner] solo
efforts so intriguing, as they fit none of the aforementioned
characterizations. Don’t fret- they still ooze the same creativity and raw
talent as her band, Trespassers William. Each one is similar in mood, and The
Bluebird of Happiness is yet another testament to Kestner’s solo prowess
apart from Trespassers William. The band’s signature album, Different Stars,
is a purple-y, swirling romantic mess of shoegaze and lovelorn crooning. It
dips in and out of hazy guitar swells that blanket and muffle Lotte’s vocals.
On her solo efforts -and this one in particular- the reverb-laden guitars are
traded for pianos and acoustics that allow for her voice to steal the
spotlight. Songs like “Paris” showcase just how beautiful her whispery voice
is when given its due presence at center stage. Somber and lamentful, The
Bluebird of Happiness doesn’t deviate much from previous records like China
Mountain.
Again, intimacy is one of the main draws, here. The entirety feels like
Williams is blanketing the listener with her personal lamentations, and she
feels so very close. This is due to the bare production and lack of layering.
The minimalism is apt, and is the chief variation from equally-beautiful
voices of her peers and Trespassers William alike. I would go as far to argue
that Lotte Kesner’s defining moments of her solo catalogue comes from this
album, in the form of her cover of Beyonce’s “Halo.” What could have easily
come off as cheap and intrusive instead highlights Williams’s knack for
communicating the same level of sentimentalism and authenticity through her
own subtlety as Beyonce does by stretching her voice to such limits. And
further, it feels utterly in place. Always, Kestner’s composition and track
placement feels purposeful and restrained. The melancholy and homogeny might
meld together into what some feel is too dismal and same-y, but those
listeners will be missing out on an ever-consistent musician displaying how
everything she touches turns beautiful, no matter what name it’s released
under.
*
I think I can explain Anna-Lynne Williams through Beyonc, or at least
through the startling cover of “Halo” that finds its home on The Bluebird of
Happiness. These post-Trespassers Williams records have freed Williams to
render music in whatever shape she wants, and while they’ve mostly been
confined to the folk music we’d expect of the truest basement dweller, it’s
telling that she’s chosen to minimise herself with whatever tools she uses,
as if to say that all that’s behind the dream-pop is the person who got lost
in the sound and longed for a love. Beyonc is a worthy contender because
she’s there playing for Williams when she can’t look into her notebook; she’s
another one lost and looking, at least for “Halo”, and someone on the
outside. Longing isn’t just a love nobody’s giving back — it can be a shared
feeling emanating from our speakers.
It would be easy to say Williams’ take on “Halo”, hardly a song for someone
dug underground, is a departure from the Lotte Kestner project, even in its
autonomous, free-write and take-all form. Maybe it would be easy to see the
cover as another shock value Youtube crossover, like where someone does an
acoustic Death Grips cover because that’s completely mental and
counterfactual, but to hell with that — it’s not like Williams is playing
“Starships”. This isn’t a departure because it doesn’t reinvent Williams,
just what she’s listening to. Until now her covers have been of Interpol, Bon
Iver, and the National, the kind of indie rock anxiety anthems that try to
grab something once it’s gone. The desperation of her “Lief Erikson” cover,
particularly, captures what Paul Banks’ lyrics share with many of her own —
“You come here to me / We’ll collect these lonely parts” sees him on the
grieving scale, though Turn on the Bright Lights ends before he can get to
acceptance. What Williams sees in this, I think, is herself; the incisive
songwriter in her picked out “Lief Erikson” and “Skinny Love” because they
got close to her, and because Lotte Kestner is a project that sides with the
unrequited and dispirited. “Halo” might not have the stalwarts of indie rock
behind it, but it comes from a strong, brilliant voice that can’t help make
someone else their damning lot.
It just fits. Williams is so good with covers because she can find the exact
metaphors that fit her own, ones she can scale on her own if she so chooses.
Beyonc’s lyrics are sunbeams fighting against her darkest nights, Williams
is the building and her lover is the ceiling. The Bluebird of Happiness is
the kind of imagined — and yet resolutely direct — conversation a
singer-songwriter can have with another person, even if the walls are a
lonely stand-in. “The Wrestler”, a melancholic folk song covered over by a
haze of tinny sound, begins with Williams’ giving the answer to a question we
never hear asked, and turns the routine moment, the ‘you got a light?’ of all
beginnings, into a list of reasons she’s been consumed. Finally: “wrestle you
into every thought”. It won’t be news to anyone who’s heard Different Stars,
but Williams offers rare insight in the domain of the personal pronoun; she
can will her opposite number into existence with as much as a “you” and the
words that surround it. Williams is always having a conversation.
And weirdly, The Bluebird of Happiness might prove Williams to be the
opposite of a placid songwriter, or a simple songwriter. She’s one built for
dream-pop and delicate folk music, but more accustomed to a heavy crash, and
as Lotte Kestner, her strumming is a great feint. On the record’s title track
she plays guitar like a clock ticking slowly, but relentlessly; she repeats
“bury me at sea” with the same morbid resignation. Does any other folk record
disturb us as it aches? It took me a while to process The Bluebird of
Happiness, but so it should. This is a record laid bare for us on the
surface, but not sensationally so. It’s a record of slow-burners, but their
lethargy is used to process the painful and regret what’s already in the
past. “I said it before I meant it”, the devastating aphorism Williams sings
on “Turn the Wolves”, might be one of the hardest lyrics to hear, let alone
write, and it appears on a song fit for any number of indie folk records.
This could have been Sam Beam’s, and so it almost neatly passes us by. The
lyrics of Lotte Kestner transform and mutate, and what they do to a folk song
is deadly.
Williams is an intelligent enough songwriter not to put full force behind her
lyrics or to push any aspect of The Bluebird of Happiness into a corner. At
times, she seems more interested in the boundaries of definition, but even as
she cuts up and disjoints her record with “Eggshell”, a dark synth
experiment, she seems wary of that leap. So yes, I guess I wasn’t taken aback
by her “Halo”, because it was another painful moment that wouldn’t overstep.
Coming back to The Bluebird of Happiness is integral to its brilliance,
revealing the conversations and the damage done, but Beyonc is being sung
downstairs like everything else. The song you heard at the Super Bowl mustn’t
wake a soul, and like anything that fits into a Lotte Kestner record,
Williams will whisper as these walls come tumbling down.
*
Bluebirds often have mythological associations, sometimes adopting
superstitious symbolism, other times encountered in fairy tales. Every so
often they are portrayed as emblems of hope and faith, spiritual embodiments
of the rising sun, with the belief that the dawn of a new day brings the
promise of opportunities and renewal. Lotte Kestner’s new solo album, The
Bluebird of Happiness, is perhaps somehow inspired by these symbolic
connotations of the bluebird; wrapped in a blanket of intimacy, it is a
lovelorn album that croons with a purposeful sense of emotional healing.
Interestingly, the title itself is almost self-contradictory — there’s an icy
numbness as Kestner’s emotive vocals chill to the bone, and yet the abundance
of overwhelming sincerity and emotion contained within the trembling sound
waves of every string plucked, every note sung, arouses a tender happiness.
The mournful ‘String’ begins with a tentative, whispered countdown, leading
into the powerfully poetic lament of possible abandonment — “love, love if
you love me, why do you make me miss you so?” while violins and the echo of
hums haunt the acoustic refrain. ‘Wrestler’ adopts romanticised metaphors for
hearts with buildings and matches, lyrically brooding of the emotional and
psychological wrestlings with love, whereas title track ‘The Bluebird of
Happiness’ utilises a muted piano as Kestner sombrely croons, “bury me at
sea” around a harmonised murmur that resonates across the ocean of melodies.
She teams up with Damien Jurado, the Seattle based indie rock musician, on
the ballad Turn of the Wolves’, while stripping Beyonc’s ‘Halo’ right back
to the bare exposure of vocal control and remarkable harmonisation,
transforming it from a drum-driven declaration to an impassioned confession.
Contrastingly, Kestner’s vocals are muffled and distorted on ‘Sweetheart’, as
if they were reaching you from across a distant, transatlantic telephone
wire, which adds a soothing, dreamlike ambiance that complements the
occasional purr of a harmonica and repetitive rattle of a tambourine.
‘Eggshell’ is as fragile as the title suggests; melodically ethereal and
rhythmically sluggish, you get a sense of the draining power of love as the
lyrics, “it’s so hard to love; guess that’s what makes it worth so much.”
Similarly, ‘Cliff’ solemnly mourns lost youth and emotional strength which
can sometimes leave you hanging by a thread, as a compact orchestra of
violins, flutes, and cellos, guides the instrumentation into a melodic waltz.
Closing the album is ‘Little Things’, which builds with a tender fingerpicked
guitar and the fragile shake of percussion.
The wealth of emotion on this album is intensified by the restrain in
Kestner’s voice; she approaches the ballad-sounding tracks not with the
bellowing Adele-like choruses, but rather with a discreet, barely audible
whisper, which suggests an emotional defeat from within. Yes, the laments are
sombre and slow, but what feels unbearable in life is somehow made bearable —
and beautiful — through art, and, on this album alone, Kestner certainly has
the ability to turn everything beautiful. Lyrically moving and a pleasure to
listen to, The Bluebird of Happiness creates an emotional impact on anyone
who has ever loved which, although a universal emotion, Kestner has written
about with such thought that it also evokes a feeling of the personal. So
perhaps the hope behind this album is to unchain you from the pains of love
by confronting them as you drift through the record, eventually allowing your
soul to achieve some kind of liberation and, like the bluebird, fly free
towards happiness.
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