Listening to Zola Jesus’ third album “Conatus” is like having a near-perfect hallucination. While the music itself is real enough, it conjures up a strange topography in the mind: heartless tundra, lifeless subterranea, a monochrome planet riddled with craters. Still, the album itself possesses all that these landscapes lack ““ a groundswell of heart, Life and color that lies beneath every track.
The 22-year-old singer, whose real name is Nika Roza Danilova, is known for her melding of goth rock and electronic pop. While Danilova may be physically tiny, her voice is enormous and has unsurprisingly prompted comparisons to Siouxsie Sioux and Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins.
Her matured voice has the quivering, yet sustained timbre of female Gregorian chanting, only more sensual.
For the curious, “Conatus” is a term used in philosophy to refer to the tendency of all living things to persist in their own being. The album opens with “Swords,” a short but fitting overture to the rest of “Conatus” in which Danilova’s ghostly vocals bloom between glitchy and heavy beats.
Ironically, the next track, “Avalanche,” begins with the lyrics “In the end,” a refrain sung repetitively throughout her previous album “Stridulum II.” In proper post-punk form, Danilova has certain lyrics and vocal melodies she likes to slip into track after track (think Joy Division). This touch of minimalism, thankfully, doesn’t devolve into monotony.
“Vessel” comes close to fulfilling what Danilova called the desire to write “the perfect pop song.” It opens with Danilova’s voice echoing as though reflected through a sonic hall of mirrors. The beat is simple and infectious, but does not betray the fact that Danilova wrote the song in 30 minutes. Toward the end of the song, “Vessel” turns into aggressive noise bordering on the industrial ““ an abrupt and delicious finale.
Though “Ixode” doesn’t have lyrics, Danilova succeeds in creating a beautiful and expressive track, hearkening back to the ethereal-sounding “mouth music” Fraser was known for during her time with the Cocteau Twins.
In a way, “Conatus” is an expected, natural progression from her previous work. The album is imaginative, but doesn’t break with the polished aesthetic of “Stridulum II.” The listener will encounter elegant synths and strings in “Hikikomori,” the anthemic “Lick the Palm of a Burning Handshake” in which beats sound like footfalls of crusaders and “In Your Nature,” which is perhaps the most liberated and ““ strangely ““ joyful song on the album.
There’s the spare piano and angelic vocalizing of “Skin,” and “Seekir,” which, minus the strangled, creepy chanting, sounds like a danceable track that could probably pass itself off on turntables at a club.
This album, while lovely, also has a palpable tension. Danilova’s songwriting has an elemental quality (lyrics like “Fill my heart, my soul with fire,” icy synths, gale-like arrangements), which perhaps is owed in part to the isolation of growing up in a wooded town in the Wisconsin wilderness.
In Danilova’s liner notes for “Conatus”, she writes of her emotional exhaustion, liberating herself from herself and communicating her prison through music.
This kind of “suffering artist” rhetoric can quickly become passe to a listener, even if the sentiment is genuine. And, though her biography seems tinged with the mythical, her music need not lean on designs of personality, real or otherwise. Gorgeously structured and accessible, “Conatus” requires no self-conscious annotations to be enjoyed.
““ Lenika Cruz
Email Cruz at [email protected].