Zeebee
hails, as her record label’s website announces
ironically, from Austria’s west coast. She has,
over the years, gained considerable recognition in her
native country with a variety of projects. Her musical
career started with D-Sire, a band she formed with techno-heads
Kreml. With them, she recorded one album, Moving
Back & Forward. Following a couple of years
away from the limelight, she started working with musicians
from all over the world, using the Internet as her medium.
Over the next three years, Zeebee apparently wrote nearly
two hundred songs and received an impressive 72,500
listeners on the defunct MP3.com. In the early days
of 2003, she teamed up with Gerhard Potuznik and set
off to release an album. Reworking some of her songs,
the pair have finally collated ten tracks on this superb
debut, released on Austrian label Angelika Koelhermann.
Drawing inspiration on anything from folk to pop and
jazz to electronica, Chemistry is a refreshing
and inventive record. With a voice often recalling the
tones of Nicollette, and a flair for quirky melodies,
Zeebee presents here a piece of work that finds its
place somewhere between sensitive pop a la Björk
and melodic abstraction. In just over half an hour,
Zeebee’s tortuous personal tales create a bubble
in which the listeners are invited to wander and loose
themselves. Using electronic instruments as the basis
for her creations, Zeebee and her collaborators randomly
inject acoustic elements, guitars and pianos mainly,
to highlight the fragility of the sonic constructions
and balance her instantly recognisable voice. There
are elements of innocence and perversion running through
these ten songs as Zeebee’s sweet and sour vocals
constantly shifts between little girl’s playground
refrains and the torments of a far more mature woman.
The song writing is equally excellent here. As she is
quoted in the press release saying ‘I would rather
wonder about myself than analyse someone else too much’,
she dives deep inside to extract subtle stories of love
and relationship, avoiding any overweight imagery to
focus instead on moving touches.
If the sonic ambiences explored here are extremely eclectic
in essence, Chemistry appears surprisingly
consistent all the way through. With elements of jazz
(Tender), summery ballads (Truth,
the Gainsbourg-esque Soul Collateral) and ambient
(Open Up You Eyes, Lost & Found,
Race), this album could appear to loose itself
slightly, yet Zeebee and her collaborators holds the
thing together superbly, always keeping the focus on
the core emotional nature of each song in sight.
Despite the number of collaborators on board, Chemistry
ultimately remains Zeebee’s intimate expression
of her artistic vision. This album is in turn extremely
charming and pertinent. A very promising debut.
3.9/5 |
