-John Fogerty
Kellarissa - Moons of Neptune
Kellarissa (nèe Larissa Loyva) was hardly a new face on the music scene when her record came across my desk at WOBC, but I’d never heard of her at the time. Turns out, she’s a household name in some circles. An alum of P:ano, The Choir Practice, and Gigi, she toured with Destroyer in support of her sophomore effort, Moons of Neptune. At the time, I was on a Nico kick, so this record was right up my alley. It still is.
The formula for these songs is easy enough to crack: angular synth or vocal line is introduced, then fleshed out over a normal pop-song timeframe (3 to 5 minutes). Apart from that, there’s room for a ton of variation. It’s a very sparse record – there’s little else beside Loyva’s dark soprano (multitracked), her synthesizer, and a drum machine, but the lack of bells-and-whistles means that her compositions take center stage. This kind of parsimony lends Loyva’s music a kind of slick, sleek quality. Rather than lumbering through these cuts, each one feels effortlessly crafted (a masterful trick, no doubt). Less is more on this album; Loyva seems to take sonic cues from Nico’s chilling organ opus The Marble Index, but not emotional ones. Rather than the Bergmanesque, nightmarish quality of Marble Index, Moons of Neptune has pleasant moments. Even the more unsettling moments – “Blood + Sand,” “Sisu” – don’t terrify in the way that Nico does. That’s a credit, not a knock: her voice is flat-out gorgeous, and it’s a pleasure to listen to.
This is not a pop album, per se; there are choruses, there are hooks, but they don’t take center stage the way they would on other pop records. That’s not to say that the songs are subpar: far from it. Kellarissa knows what she’s doing, and she does it better than most people working in her territory. “Flatlands” is even radio-friendly. But unlike a lot of pop songs, you can’t fast-forward to the chorus – or even to another verse – without missing something gorgeous.
A version of this review originally appeared on www.wobc.org on 4/6/11.
