Australia's Carla Dal Forno (Blackest Ever Black) was recently named one of Stereogum's Best New Bands of 2017. "Her music is characterized by a pervasive haunting, unfurling in smoke wisps and snaking base lines. Songs like the creeping “What You Gonna Do Now?” and the bruised “Make Up Talk” explore not the unsettling unknown but the sort of everyday monsters that surround us, those whose demons we know all too well." - Stereogum
"Evokes Julianna Barwick’s painterly vocal compositions with a dark pop sheen: cavernous, industrial percussion offering a counterweight to dal Forno's velvety delivery." - Pitchfork on 'The Garden'
"Smoky and ominous, Australian singer/songwriter Carla dal Forno's 'You Know What It's Like' simmers, both musically and thematically, while she inhabits the gloom of her arrangements like a ghost." - Pitchfork on 'You Know What It's Like'
"What really gives this record its strength is the total lack of bombast. There’s no sense of braggadocio. No sense of being in the 'music industry.' No striving to make a point to peers... Synths swells ebb and flow, and a menace creeps into the most unexpected of places." - The Quietus on 'You Know What It's Like'
"There's a distinctly Mitteleuropa aura to her enigmatic Nico-like vocals." - MOJO
Australian pop singer Carla Dal Forno's 'You Know What It’s Like' is an album for inbetween days, and occupies inbetween states: plain-speaking pop, disorientated by dub. Psychedelic folk delivered with (post-)punk economy. Drifting in space while still tethered to the ground. Astral tones blurred with earth sounds: wood, bone, breath, skin, dirt. Ending and beginning, dying and becoming. Longing for adventure and an unquiet life. Struggling to get out of bed.
This is Carla dal Forno’s debut solo album, following time in cult Melbourne group Mole House and an earlier association with Blackest Ever Black as a member of F ingers and Tarcar. Her voice is an extraordinary instrument: both disarmingly conversational and glacially detached. It has something of the bedsit urbanity of Anna Domino, Marine Girls, Antena, or Helen Johnstone - stoned and deadpan - but it can also summon a gothic intensity that Nico or Kendra Smith would approve of. This voice is the perfect embodiment of dal Forno's emotionally ambiguous songs: their lyrics rooted in the everyday, observing and exposing a series of uncomfortable truths. This voice asks difficult questions of singer, subject, and sung-to. - Blackest Ever Black
TESS ROBY:
Tess Roby is an artist born in Toronto, and currently working in Montreal. Accompanied by her brother, Eliot Roby on guitar, her music rides the melancholic line between classic 80s new-wave and lyric-driven pop. The listener simultaneously feels the intimacy of Roby's bedroom, cut with a romantic urgency akin to Hounds Of Love era Kate Bush. The arrangements are strictly minimal and hauntingly sparse, giving way to the richness of Roby’s voice and the hypnotic pulses of her analogue synthesizer. Her debut LP is soon to be released on Italians Do It Better (Chromatics, Desire, Johnny Jewel).
Monday, 5/28 at 8:30 pm / EARLY SHOW / Local opener TBA