From Time
off magazineNora Keyes is an eccentric singer/songwriter based in
Los Angeles who brings a quality to her songs you just don’t hear
often enough these days.
Listening to her latest record, Songs To Cry By For The End Of The Golden
Age Of Nothing, you’re invited to relieve yourself of most preconceptions
about song form. Keyes prefers to transport us back to a period where
song wasn’t necessarily about hooks or melody, but more about storytelling
and the art of escaping reality.
The story of Nora Keyes is equally as interesting as her songwriting approach.
It’s a tale of commitment to the pursuit of exquisite beauty and,
above all else, a desire to avoid mediocrity.
“To sum up my existence,” Keyes says, “I am someone
who pursues things [that are] beautiful. I try my very best to surround
myself with such objects and experiences. I often feel quite alone in
this modern world and imagine myself as a lost egret trying desperately
to find her long ago destroyed sanctuary. I also hate pigeons. I see them
as symbols of mediocrity.
“I often fantasise about myself, in my egret bird form, with my
flamingo friend, ripping pigeons apart with our beaks and claws. Currently,
I am working on a seal that depicts the slaughter of pigeons by exotic
birds. I am probably best described as the town idiot. I am a mess, often
absent-minded, and a shoddy musician.”Images like the disembowelment
of pigeons by other birds aren’t difficult to imagine while listening
to Keyes’s music. Each of her songs are deeply emotive, promising
both consolation and abandonment.“The way my music is perceived
by others is different to how I perceive it,” she replies when quizzed
of her impressions of the latest record.
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“For me, many of the
songs are sad. I have cried at least once while performing all of them.
I think they are often viewed as ‘novelty’ songs. The Golden
Age Of Nothing is a term my father came up with to describe the present
state of culture in America. I believe it is a powerful term and
an acute definition of our time.
“I added it to my album name because it sums up the lost feeling
one suffers when dealt the fate of a living anachronism. The atmosphere
of my album is of a found recording of a concert in a haunted house. The
performance was intended only for ghosts from another age, [an age] before
‘Nothing’.”
As another year rolls around, Keyes is excited by what it holds. And,
while some of her goals are complicated and possibly quite time-consuming,
others are surprisingly simple.
“Presently,” she says, “I plan to record another album,
tour Europe, and consume large amounts of ice cream.”
Nora Keyes plays The Zoo Friday January 14. Songs To Cry By For The End
Of The Golden Age Of Nothing available through DualpLOVER Recordings.
LAWRENCE ENGLISH
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NORA KEYES - review from S7
: sound play
Songs to Cry by for the Golden Age of Nothing
dualpLOVER
If the girl from The Ring had an organ stuck in the well with her, this
is the kind of music she would make. Not the remake either, the original
Japanese version...it’s heaps scarier. Nora Keyes has released her
debut album on the eccentric Sydney label dualpLOVER, and to put it bluntly,
it’s frightening. Songs to Cry by is a concept album interwoven
with themes of life, death, suffering and (surprise, surprise) transcendence.
Full of haunting melodies, gloomy lyrics and a sinister, even bloodcurdling
vocal styling, it’s definitely not for the faint hearted. As her
organ plays on, we’re confronted with the many paradoxical incarnations
of Nora Keyes. She appears both ominous and pure, wicked and beautiful.
Clearly, Keyes experiments with her range, shifting from an angelic falsetto
to witch-like howling and cackling. There’s a duality, a sense of
familiarity juxtaposed against that of the unknown, like that of a dream.
Maybe this fiendish witch has appropriated sounds from my nightmares?
‘Cauliflower’ is haunting – the drone of the organ fading
through a series of twisted harmonies. While Nora’s vocal range
is altogether astounding, it is at times painfully evocative. On ‘My
Child’, Ms Keyes howls: “my child eat your little, cold, piece
of meat and your soggy brussel sprouts / because you have nothing / in
a puddle of urine / not your own.” Positively disturbing, these
lyrics create striking visual imagery. ‘Old Pal’ – which,
coincidently, is a Jimmie Rodgers cover – is the lightest track
on the album, as Keyes breaks into a possessed, but strangely effective,
form of yodelling. In ‘The Show is Over’, Nora shapeshifts
yet again, this time adopting a childlike quality to her voice. But more
or less, this banshee seems to float on some dark rain cloud, eerily overseeing
an ominous world of cruelty and bedlam. This is truly original stuff from
a lass who apparently grew up in a haunted house. Maybe that explains
it. Regardless, organs are really, really creepy. Period.
-Cassandra Kiely
"This is Nora Keyes' (of The Centimeters) new solo album and it
is everything I hoped it would be. The best way to describe it would be
if you were digging through a crate of old 78s and found a dusty old album
in the back covered with earth and leaves with songs by a woman who has
probably spent a lot of time alone in a shack before recording her music.
The recording itself really does have the feel of a much older recording
with vocals that sound like they were recorded at the same studio that
did recording for those old black and white Popeye cartoons. I love all
the songs on this album, but I think my favorites are "Small Apart"
(which I saw her perform at a Centimeters show before with a bunch of
her teeth blacked out which added to the effect of her creepy cackling
during the song), "Look At You, You're Ugly", and her cover
of a Jimmy Rogers yodelling song called "Old Pal" (which I would
love to direct a video for...it would be neat to see Nora in a 50s style
cowgirl outfit). Other people performing music on this album are Creekbird,
Rebecca Lynn, and Ray Day of The Centimeters and Dame Darcy (whose weird
episode of Blind Date I finally saw today) on Autoharp and Saw. This is
not "normal" music by any means so get this if you are looking
from something so different from mainstream music today that it may as
well be from outer space. This is good music for taking a bath or doing
work in the toolshed. By the way, each CD cover is handmade featuring
artwork by Nora herself. She's on tour right now so check your local club
listings to see if she's in your town soon."
reviewed by Chris Beyond in no-fi magazine. |
