Review: Christina Rosenvinge, Frozen Pool
Surprisingly lovely, considering the pedigree: Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley back former Spanish pop star for a nearly-acoustic album of fragile, fucked up songs.
Rosenvinge's voice lives in the ragged territory between the bashful and the brazen, recalling most strongly Bjork's whispered verses of "It's Oh So Quiet" or the more subdued passages of Lisa Germano's Geek the Girl. By no means a strident or confident outing, Rosenvinge makes up for it with immense amounts of charm. "Expensive Shoes" could be a rare, uplifting Nico song. "Glue," the penultimate track, has a melody line so sticky that it will gum up your mind for days (sorry).
The motivating influence is 60's pop, but filtered through a gauzy haze, so the defining and incriminating details are smoothed out. It's like blurry Polaroids of your cousins' Roman vacation, or the fuzzy memories the boys have of the Lisbon girls in The Virgin Suicides: evanescent, transitory, and psychologically damaging.

Disclaimer: your tolerance for girls with cute accents will have a lot to do with the mileage you get out of this record.

Labels: christina rosenvinge, reviews