Blood curdling beauty and passion

The blood curdling beauty and passion of "Perpetual Light of the Void" by New Orleans singer-songwriter / multi-instrumentalist Daphne Parker Powell, and from her 7th upcoming album "The Death of Cool", comes at you in a full on panoramic way. From the onset it feels like an orchestral folk ballad with swirling horns and Powell's moving piano fills (and frills) and her exquisitely emotional singing and storytelling that is literally full flesh and bloodied metaphors as if seems to shift to gothic rock places, until it explodes into amazing full art rock mode featuring a kick ass killer lead guitar break. It is like an amalgam of Maude Maggart, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey, Kate Bush and Queen, this is a shape shifting surprise.

LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed):

[The rituals and prayers we modern, western kids tend toward are almost always rooted in more arcane practices of faiths rarely survived in antiquity. But even in cultural pockets like New Orleans, where voodoo and hoodoo and general witchery have kept pace with time, you can see only glimpses of their origins.]

Kudos to the sheer poetry of these abstract, sometimes dark, lyrics and the equally artful, filmic Official Video whose imagery (including shrouded faces) that had my mind going to The Mars Volta's 2005 album cover for "Frances the Mute" and feeling the dour emotional patina of a Robert Eggers film.

Once again, Daphne Parker Powell's songwriting is open and vulnerable, naked in it's reveals. In a previous review I said that her "vocal character walks a tightrope between a full bodied confessional, a vibrato that within the context (of her storytelling) can feel like a painful tremble" but I will add that while the songs I have heard do feel like bloodletting, they also feel like a sort of communal embrace, like trauma bonding and that is always a good thing, a powerful thing.