Name: Here, There
Brand: Melissa Weikart

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

CD-NS-155

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

Discs

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2022-05-27

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Redeye

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

309272739015

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Melissa Weikart

Genre US

Rock-Pop

Label US

Northern Spy Records

There are countless intimate, fret-noise-filled records from singer-guitarists across the history of modern popular music, but solo piano and voice releases remain a comparative rarity. It's hard to imagine an artist better equipped to contribute to this canon than France-based singer, keyboardist, and composer Melissa Weikart. A conservatory-trained classical pianist and improviser, Weikart's accompaniment on her debut album, <i>Here, There</i>, swells to catharses of orchestral proportions; it's usually easy to forget this is the work of just one player. Here, adding additional instruments also might obscure some of this bold and playful record's most compelling interplay: the way Weikart's hands frequently seem to move out of correspondence with each other, reaching for conflicting rhythms and key areas. Gestures like these carefully underscore the Boston-reared singer-songwriter's fraught reflections on devotion, obsession, and doubt, delivered naturalistically and matter-of-factly despite the complexity of the musical setting. Her piano parts lurch forward and get caught in dizzying loops as her narrators drift ahead of and behind themselves in moments of psychological crisis. She uses heavy chromaticism to dramatize their uneasy reflections, recalling the word painting of musical theater composers like Stephen Sondheim or luminaries of 20th-century classical art song: the chanson writers of her current home country (Gabriel Faure Claude Debussy, Francis Poulenc) or, at more acerbic moments, American avant-gardists like Charles Ives. For all the ambition and virtuosity of these compositions, Here, There is fundamentally a study in restraint. The songs seem to unfold spontaneously before they unravel; they drop the listener into the middle of moments of obsessive self-analysis. Weikart's lyrical trajectories are always effortless to follow - palpable and sympathetic even in the context of music which makes a point of avoiding the familiar.

Here, There

Music US