musicAddicted

Loneliness and austerity seem to be the driving forces behind Noveller, the one-woman project of Brooklyn’s Sarah Lipstate. Everything about her musical persona is connected with solitude: shows performed alone with only her instruments; the imagery found in the names of her releases – desert fires, red rainbows, and now a glacial glow – which evoke only thoughts of absence and abandonment; and, most importantly, the structure and consistency of her music, which is shaped around the sound of a single guitar. Granted, that sound is echoed, destructed, fragmented and evolved from simple melody into a tame beast of droning lullabies, but its solitariness is inherent and of an intentional and soothing kind; even though Lipstate’s compositions may sound blue or even dark, their loneliness is wanted, welcome, and used to instill a deep focus on the humble guitar and its many possibilities.

Compared with Lipstate’s earlier works, this second full-length is more diverse and melodic. Where she used to experiment more openly with intensity, texture and form, Glacial Glow finds her focusing more on the smaller details and on creating a sense of natural flow within and outside of each composition. This ability to see the bigger picture and the interconnection between its fragments makes the album compelling, and somehow easier to digest and understand without ever being straightforward or simple; Lipstate plays with nicely contrasting elements right from the beginning. The album deals with icy coldness, but the sound of the guitar layered into a short and pastoral melody in the introductory Entering (the actual song which is streamed above) is warm and inviting, as if Lipstate were welcoming us into the hot heart of an Icelandic glaciovolcano. Combined with the yearning sound of an amplified, e-bow picked guitar, the ever-rising melody evokes a graceful simplicity.

Read the entire review on Wears The Trousers magazine.