Anouk is changing course again – and a fearless dip in the imagination of Isidora Zebeljan

Anouk changes course again

Great but not bombastic, rock but not clichéd. For the collection of songs on her new, fifteenth album Set this thing on fire Anouk chose a rougher style than she showed in recent years. It is one of the properties that makes her exceptional: the need to change course. Is it fickle? Fear of boredom? Or is life too short for one musical color? Because Anouk (The Hague, 1975) has a broad taste.

The songs on her previous album, DEENA & JIM (2023), received ‘cinematic’ guidance, with large orchestra and dramatic twists, inspired by her love for Disney soundtracks. She previously made the Dutch -speaking Wen d’r (2018), with singer-songwriter-like songs with intelligible lyrics.

She is now shifting her flair to exciting rock. Anouk will regularly perform this summer at festivals and festivals thrive at Rockknummers, she thinks. That is why nine out of ten new songs encourage and flames.

For example, she is now back at the start of her career, which was once cranked by the success of rock song ‘Nobody’s Wife’ (1977). Apart from the rougher Fake it till we (2016), and a Poppy rock song as a ‘girl’, the rock theme was largely passed.

But there they are again: the howling in the singing, crackling chord series on the guitar and high -up pace of the drums. Musicians from earlier versions of her band, such as guitarist Leendert Haaksma and bassist Michel van Schie, play it with verve.

Producer Thomas Azier, who also gave the rock songs on the recent album of Hang Youth a surprising edge, previously worked on her DEENA & JIM. As a producer, he weaves air here between the heavy elements. The drums never really drown, many songs get a light keyboard tune like Leitmotiv.

The driver of the excitement is Anouk herself, her voice curls and wriggles like a demon along the scales. She gives a large job to all types of expression, she sounds mean, bright, fierce. Her voice sounds freshly sharpened and therefore sharper, tighter and more dynamic than in the past.

She wrote the songs partly alone and partly with permanent employee Martin Gjerstad. The lyrics fit rock, with their Bozig tone and negative self -image. Because no matter how successful, with Anouk the glass is usually half empty. At a time when many musicians like to get the breast on the chest, that is refreshing. Anouk sings himself like this: « Forgive Me and My Manners, I’d Rather Be Alone(In ‘Can’t Fix repeaters’);My Heart is just a big ego rooted in Dark Dirt(‘Where the Mind Goes’), and sometimes vulnerable,’You Better Be Careful/ That’s My Heart You Hold« ( » That’s my heart you hold « ).

After the pleasant Schel-Frisse Rock shower from Opener ‘That’s My Heart You Hold’, ‘How to Clear A Room’ and the title track are also successful. Close ‘Vicky Lane’ is the only ballad, an early Christmas issue with light sentimental text (« Will you be home for Christmas?« ). Between the striking there are a few mistakes. The high singing sounds too dramatic in ‘Losing My Mind’ and ‘Outrage 3,2,1’. ‘I see you’, on the other hand, gradually develops from light rock to increasingly rougher supplicism.

Hester Carvalho

An ode to the musical soul of Isidora Zebeljan

It was dusk in Belgrade that first day of September last year. The two of us walked through the Vračar district with its monumental Christian Orthodox Church. And not far from here stood their house, Borislav Cicovacki, biologist, oboist and writer of scientific and melancholic novels about the collapse of Yugoslavia.

It was dusk in Belgrade that first day of September last year. The two of us walked through the Vračar district with its monumental Christian Orthodox Church. And not far from here stood their house, Borislav Cicovacki, biologist, oboist and writer of scientific and melancholic novels about the collapse of Yugoslavia.

In that house he lived with his wife, composer Isidora Zebeljan. Five years ago, two days after her 53rd birthday, his great love died. « She was someone, » he mused, « with an irresistible musical soul. Her notes brought tears to our eyes and dried them into passing. Isidora let love awake in the minds of her listeners. »

The album was released on Friday Three Curious Lovesan ode to Zebeljan by the Dutch-British violinist Daniel Rowland and his-and her-friends. The title of the clarinet quintet ‘Song of a Traveler in the Night’ summarizes the essence of her music: a fearless dive in the imagination, who listening internally to what light and darkness, often dancing with everything that can freestly drive.

Zebeljan’s pieces are erratic and mysterious, but always full of zest for life, even the most tranquil of it, for example ‘Dark Velvet’ and ‘Intimate letter from Judean Desert’, both glowed by the ‘Dutch’ Arethusa Quartet. ‘Dark Velvet’ wrote Zebeljan twenty years ago as a Memoriam for the composer Gustav Mahler, the man who was looking for – and she seems to do that – for a spiritual core.

Zebeljan also wrote two wonderfully beautiful and narrative pieces, ‘The Cherry Orchard’ and ‘Andrey’s Violin’, with the two famous theater works The cherry garden and Three Sisters From the Russian writer Anton Chekhov. The album includes a sample of hair. The documents once again prove the development of recent years that today’s composers have shaken the post -war intellectualist feathers, because they could not fly with those feathers. Nowadays the fantasy just gets freedom again. And Zebeljan’s art is a good example of it.

The title work ‘Three Curious Loves’ – a violin concert dedicated to Daniel Rowland – was described to him by the composer as an adventurous treasure hunt over ‘seven mountains and oceans, to three magical treasures hidden in golden eggs in the forested Twente hills’. Rowland would find three love in that, she said. He only had one, the Serbian cellist Maja Bogdanovic, threw the violinist. But Zebeljan was right: in the following years two daughters were born.

This infectious imagination – with the composer and the musicians – explains a musical soul that is not only to speak with Cicovacki, « irresistible, » but also seems immortal.

Joost Galema

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