Julia Holter – Loud City Song

Julia Holter – Loud City Song (Domino Records)

This singer and multi-instrumentalist’s first two albums were inspired by Greek tragedies and New Wave French cinema, and on her third full-length she fixes her musical magnifying glass on Gigi, the 1958 musical about a reluctant young courtesan-in-training who enamors a charming older man. Though she was inspired specifically by a scene in which the crowd in a Parisian bar gossips about the unlikely couple, from there she broadens her thematic scope to include society’s general obsession with celebrity and voyeurism. Thankfully she can translate this cerebral source material into music that’s not only conceptually interesting but also breathtakingly beautiful, eccentric, and emotionally evocative. On ‘Maxim’s I’ she asks, ‘All the birds are watching me – do they have more important things to do?’ For me, for much longer than Loud City Song’s 45-minute run time, the answer is ‘No.’

//www.youtube.com/embed/H5M8qRN_Rl0

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