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Indie rock in the Internet age tends to gravitate toward clear, linear storylines, fairy tales full of snowbound hideouts and religious cults, life-changing breakups and unused fancy college degrees. But it’s hard to make a story stick to Zola Jesus, a diminutive 22-year-old with a retiring demeanor and an unusually big voice.
She’s opera-trained but makes music that finds its emotional register in unarticulated ambiguity — there isn’t a vowel or consonant that she can’t swallow. She grew up in the woods of rural Wisconsin, but she makes glossy dance music with Rory Kane under the banner of Nika+Rory, after her real name, Nika Roza Danilova. Her chosen alias is an allusion to Jesus Christ and Émile Zola, though Danilova claims to have a strong interest in neither.
“Conatus,” out this week, is her third full-length album in three years. The recordings — along with a handful of very good EPs and one-off collaborations with other artists from across the pop spectrum — trace a more or less constant line up out of the smoky, noisy, grinding minimalism of Danilova’s early compositions to a sound that’s fuller and more assured. It is the type of music to which critics append the suffix “-wave,” though which kind is often unclear — dark? Crimson? Dolphin?
“Vessel,” from “Conatus,” is a typical Zola Jesus song: echoing and wordless to start, with minimal but emphatic percussion and a spare melody, here sounded out on a piano. It begins with a lyric that would be undecipherable without liner notes — “luster so sheen it pulls you in / frets on the harpoons” — and builds, mostly by virtue of the volume and force Danilova pours into her formidable, melancholy-tinged voice. By the end of the song it sounds like she’s threatening you. “It surrounds all your dreams,” she sings. “It will take you to fears you never knew.”
What is the “it” here? And why so dour? Part of this is a feint — as often as not, Danilova is professing love, or support, or something that is not expressible in English. Her range, one gets the sense, is broader than it occasionally appears to on “Conatus”: With the size and quality of her voice, Danilova could be an excellent balladeer in the commercial R&B mode, or a gently wicked dance-floor sprite, if she weren’t so absorbed with wandering through slate-colored soundscapes at meditative speeds.
“In Your Nature” is the closest she comes on “Conatus” to breaking character — after quiet wallow of violin and gentle singing, a drum machine joins in, speeds up and suddenly, for a moment at least, Danilova’s barking encouragement like a pop star. “Run off run off, let it drip down you / Run off run off, like it was born for you.” It doesn’t last, but it’s a hint of what could be.
Then again, we have plenty of pop stars already. The color and texture of Danilova’s voice naturally bend toward something bleak, or at least dramatic; she makes sadness sound good, healthy — not shameful or regrettable.
“Collapse,” the last song on “Conatus,” is a love song about falling out of love, a song about being empowered by experiencing a lack of power. “I’ve got no war the day you go away,” she sings, over a mournful wash of synthesizer noise. “Oh it kills me oh and I don’t want to give it in anymore.” Like the rest of the tracks on “Conatus,” it’s a big song about feeling small.
Indie rock in the Internet age tends to gravitate toward clear, linear storylines, fairy tales full of snowbound hideouts and religious cults, life-changing breakups and unused fancy college degrees. But it’s hard to make a story stick to Zola Jesus, a diminutive 22-year-old with a retiring demeanor and an unusually big voice.
She’s opera-trained but makes music that finds its emotional register in unarticulated ambiguity — there isn’t a vowel or consonant that she can’t swallow. She grew up in the woods of rural Wisconsin, but she makes glossy dance music with Rory Kane under the banner of Nika+Rory, after her real name, Nika Roza Danilova. Her chosen alias is an allusion to Jesus Christ and Émile Zola, though Danilova claims to have a strong interest in neither.
“Conatus,” out this week, is her third full-length album in three years. The recordings — along with a handful of very good EPs and one-off collaborations with other artists from across the pop spectrum — trace a more or less constant line up out of the smoky, noisy, grinding minimalism of Danilova’s early compositions to a sound that’s fuller and more assured. It is the type of music to which critics append the suffix “-wave,” though which kind is often unclear — dark? Crimson? Dolphin?
“Vessel,” from “Conatus,” is a typical Zola Jesus song: echoing and wordless to start, with minimal but emphatic percussion and a spare melody, here sounded out on a piano. It begins with a lyric that would be undecipherable without liner notes — “luster so sheen it pulls you in / frets on the harpoons” — and builds, mostly by virtue of the volume and force Danilova pours into her formidable, melancholy-tinged voice. By the end of the song it sounds like she’s threatening you. “It surrounds all your dreams,” she sings. “It will take you to fears you never knew.”
What is the “it” here? And why so dour? Part of this is a feint — as often as not, Danilova is professing love, or support, or something that is not expressible in English. Her range, one gets the sense, is broader than it occasionally appears to on “Conatus”: With the size and quality of her voice, Danilova could be an excellent balladeer in the commercial R&B mode, or a gently wicked dance-floor sprite, if she weren’t so absorbed with wandering through slate-colored soundscapes at meditative speeds.
“In Your Nature” is the closest she comes on “Conatus” to breaking character — after quiet wallow of violin and gentle singing, a drum machine joins in, speeds up and suddenly, for a moment at least, Danilova’s barking encouragement like a pop star. “Run off run off, let it drip down you / Run off run off, like it was born for you.” It doesn’t last, but it’s a hint of what could be.
Then again, we have plenty of pop stars already. The color and texture of Danilova’s voice naturally bend toward something bleak, or at least dramatic; she makes sadness sound good, healthy — not shameful or regrettable.
“Collapse,” the last song on “Conatus,” is a love song about falling out of love, a song about being empowered by experiencing a lack of power. “I’ve got no war the day you go away,” she sings, over a mournful wash of synthesizer noise. “Oh it kills me oh and I don’t want to give it in anymore.” Like the rest of the tracks on “Conatus,” it’s a big song about feeling small.
