Crooked Words #13: Carla dal Forno, Nova One, Thomas Dollbaum
Carla dal Forno - Going Out
We've been covering Carla dal Forno for close to ten years now, ever since the release of You Know What It's Like all the way back in late 2016. Enigmatic and always deeply engaging, dal Forno crafts a subtle type of dream-pop, with the dreamy nature of it all usually her music's most potent aspect.
Announced earlier this week, Confession is a brand new album from Carla, and her first new music since 2022's Come Around. Billed as an album about both 'closeness' and 'quiet upheaval', the 12-song LP arrives in April and is preceded by the softly hypnotic opening track 'Going Out'; a tender shimmer of atmospheric textures and that signature lead voice.
Where almost everything that's come before has been cryptic and half-blurred, dal Forno's hushed delivery opens itself out somewhat here, and while it retains a strange kind of beauty there's an openness to the whole thing that drapes the whole thing in a little extra light.
“This wasn’t the album I intended to make,” Carla dal Forno says of the forthcoming record. “I originally wanted something veiled and abstract, but I realised I couldn’t hide behind abstraction — the songs only worked when I leaned into emotional truth.”
Nova One - how to kiss [LP]
Another well-timed and endearing return comes in the form of how to kiss, the first album in three years from Roz Raskin's Nova One project. Released via the excellent New Orleans' label Community Records, how to kiss is the follow-up to 2023's create myself LP, and finds Raskin stripping things back to the band's earlier sepia-toned bedroom-pop sound.
Pulled from ten new songs, how to kiss feels suitably alluring, the gentleness of the compositions – mostly pulled from, and led by, a beautiful weave of synth patterns, deft acoustics and gentle percussion – is matched by Raskin's tender delivery, a charming voice that wraps the whole thing up in pink-blush of hushed romanticism.
Opening track 'basketball court' immediately invites you into said world, the shuffling percussive beats adding a woozy sense of melodrama to Raskin's playful storytelling. Indeed, that sense of playfulness runs right through the heart of how to kiss and it lends every inch of the songs here with a slightly mysterious, subtly deceptive form of magnetism – a fixed-gaze you're unsure whether to run to or from, but one you can't look away from regardless.
The whole album is out now, and available both digitally and on vinyl. Stream via Bandcamp here:
Thomas Dollbaum - Dozen Roses
With a hefty kick of dry dirt and a heap of heavy-hearted storytelling, New Orleans-based singer/songwriter Thomas Dollbaum bursts back into life with the lead single from his newly-announced Birds of Paradise LP.
If the fiery, impassioned lead single is anything to go by we're in for a real treat here too, the punchy nature of the vocal and the swirling instrumentation making good on the album's foreword which proclaims Dollbaum to be the "realest-deal storyteller in indie-rock today" and his new work as "his most powerful and dynamic work yet."
There's nothing wrong with such lofty sentiments if you can back it up and Dollbaum certainly takes a swing at it on 'Dozen Roses', the album's lead single. Bursting through more than five-minutes of gnarly Southern-rock, the track wraps scorched, heartfelt lyricism inside big swathes of propulsive guitar and drums.
"When you were a kid the whole world felt like a lonesome ocean," Dollblaum sings as the song pours forward, "Closing in with every wave that seems to come your way / I look now and it’s just tide pulled out of motion."
One of the year's most impressive statements, it's a mighty – and mightily affecting – outpouring, and one which beautifully sets up the full album which is set for release on May 22nd, via the excellent Dear Life Records.
Thank you for being here.
