Balanced emotion.
Krista Detor made an enormous impression with her CDs Mudshow and Cover Their Eyes. Her intimate piano songs proved a huge trump card for Dutch Corazong label. However, in fifteen new songs she confirms and enlarges her reputation as a singer-songwriter in an impressive way.
She grouped her songs ambitiously in groups of three, inspired amongst others by Frederico Garcia Lorca, Dylan Thomas and Charles Darwin. She recorded that last suite in Engeland, when she was invited for the Darwin Song House workshop.
This time too, the songs are musically restrained and melancholical of strucure and contents. Detor sings from philisophical angles and seemingly small personal observations. Still she and regular producer David Weber chose a quite different approach in opener Rich Man’s Life and two out of three songs of Madness Of Love. In that first track the rich melody is carried surprisingly by firm drums and there are solos for violin and Weber’s firy electric guitar. Still, Detor reigns here too with her melodic, languid vocals.
Although she teaches Darwin an ironic lesson in From Miss Emma Brawley, in most others songs she and Weber created a sound in which regret and desire resonate with serving contributions of for instance guitarist Colin Linden. In that sound Detor’s veiled voice is on top of the atmospheric, layered music that perfectly adds to her keyboards and expressive vocals. That way Chocolate Paper Suites became an exceptionally intriguing and emotional song cycle.
****
Published in Heaven no. 66, May-June 2010/no. 3