(2020) Stella Sommer - Northern Dancer


Review:
It’s tempting to see Stella Sommer as a direct descendent of Nico. On Northern Dancer, her sixth solo album and second sung entirely in English, she seems to occupy a space somewhere between the sophisticated baroque of Chelsea Girl and the avant-garde wildness of The Marble Index. But the truth is more complicated – where Nico combined a reserved iciness with the sturm und drang of compositional experimentation, Sommer creates a much more subtle kind of tension, a balance between warmth and cold, between human emotion and an affinity with the rhythmic processes of the natural world. It’s all there in the title track, where stasis gives way to movement and ice is superseded by flame. The evolving lyrical concerns are reflected in the music – a melodic piano is joined by a warm swathe of synth. Layered vocals and a clash of drums give the song a dramatic, almost triumphal finale. All this points to a songwriter and arranger in complete control of her craft, which isn’t entirely surprising given Sommer’s pedigree as both a solo artist and a member of German indie favourites Die Heiterkeit. But it is only as the album progresses and the shift of its internal rhythms becomes apparent that you really get the feel of just how well-executed it all is. The lyrics at first seem simple: Shadows Come in All Colours follows a minimal pattern, almost like a nursery rhyme, but the words have a quality which is almost synaesthetic, revealing new depths of imagery and meaning at every turn. Take away the lush musical backdrop and it could almost be a Sibylle Baier song. A theme of loss and reconciliation, of missing and longing, begins to emerge on A Lover Alone. Here the quiet tension that Sommer is so adept at building takes another form: the tone is highly personal but the resonances are universal. The Eyes of the Singer has a folkier feel, beginning with a softly strummed acoustic guitar, before it too builds into something more lush: layers of synth and minimally deployed horns create a kind of wall of sound, or rather a feather bed of sound. The melody is slow and almost sombre, but at the same time is catchy enough that you could get away with calling it pop music. It almost sounds like one of Agnetha Fältskog 1970s solo albums, if they had been produced by Joe Boyd. Sometimes a song exists on the boundary between meaning and feeling, and produces a reaction that is dreamlike and uncanny in its beauty. The first half of The Flowers Won’t Grow is a perfect example. But Sommer isn’t content to let it drift on into a state of sleep: the second half seems to break through a kind of barrier, a new forcefulness in the melody becomes apparent. A songwriter who can fashion a moment of epiphany or a sustained mood of reverie at will is definitely onto something good. A songwriter that can do both in the same three-minute song is very special indeed. There is a strong sense of mystery at work here too. Young Ghost, Old Century is full of the past’s intangible stories, while The Ocean Flows Backwards is the most potent reminder that this is an album steeped in the strange movements of nature and inspired by the widescreen skies over the North Sea, while We Only Part could just as easily be about the flow of the tides and the change of the seasons as about a human relationship. This synthesis of the human world and the natural world is fully realised in the Northern Dancer’s final song, Lights On the Water. Over a gently cascading piano Sommer comes to the conclusion that she has as much control over her own body as over the seasons, and yet there is a certainty, a calm grace, that bathes the album’s closing moments in a warm light. Northern Dancer is a stunning piece of work, full of hush and swell, profoundly evocative and brilliantly, lovingly composed.





Tracklist:
01 - Northern Dancer
02 - Shadows Come in All Colours
03 - A Lover Alone
04 - The Eyes of the Singer
05 - The Flowers Won't Grow
06 - 7 Sisters
07 - Young Ghost, Old Century
08 - The Ocean Flows Backwards
09 - We Only Part
10 - Lights On the Water


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits