Chinawoman’s third album moves towards the cinematic and confessional, centering on the themes of time and inevitability . “Let’s Part in Style” aggrandizes the moment in light of its fate, and asks how to keep things fresh – to trick the seasons, to allow time and decay to have their way but to do so in style.
The spectrum of sound is familiar from her first two albums – from post-punk minimalism to european balladry, suicide surf to grandiose choruses about melancholy subjects. The melodrama runs thick in the cinematic “Good Times Don’t Carry Over”, and Leo Ferresque “What Was Said” reaches new levels of dark, even by Chinawoman standards. “To Be With Others” has a subterranean late-floor vibe, and along with the smokey “Vacation From Love”, Chinawoman’s deep and ever-prominent vocals tackle the subjects of infidelity and personal space in relationships. Decadent, dramatic and earnest, vintage keyboards and synth strings offer the solitary rendition of a grand experience, and the voice always upfront delivers motifs familiar yet impossible to pinpoint from the great soup of European chanson. Europop track “Nothing to Talk About” does best showcasing Chinawoman’s knack for combining the celebratory and bittersweet, and the hypnotic and dissonant “Let’s Part in Style” closes the album with a final toast before fading to 16mm grain.
Maneuvering between grandiose retro motifs and a surprising sincerity, Chinawoman’s songs are tragicomic, melody-driven, sentimental and suspended in shadowy glamour. In her music lies a collective remembrance and a repurposing of influences, which in turn – expels only itself. Her story began when her bedroom-produced debut album Party Girl(2007), by some fateful unknown hand was delivered to the land of her forefathers, and soon made its way blaring from the yachts of Russian billionaires and as the ringtones of mothers all over the Ukraine. Her move from Toronto to Berlin marked a major turning point, most notably as a live act, from playing smaller shows in Toronto to regularly selling out concerts of 400-1000 guests in cities like Istanbul, Bucharest, Tbilisi, Belgrade, Athens, Vilnius and Moscow.
The daughter of a Kirov ballerina and an engineer from Leningrad, Chinawoman grew up listening to her parents’ collection of Soviet and 70’s European records. Her music has drawn comparisons to Nico and Leonard Cohen, Soviet era singing stars such as early Alla Pugacheva, with a voice akin to Tanita Tikaram. While her concerts include more live aspects and a line-up of musicians, she continues to record and release in the same bedroom manner as her first two albums – maintaining an intimacy and singleness of expression: from her bedroom to yours. A genre based partly on elements of melody and style, but moreso, a signature fatalist-celebratory approach to songwriting.
