Years ago I trawled through Myspace – remember that? –
checking out musical artists who used the word ‘gothic’ in their description.
As the labels were self-applied, they often couldn’t be taken that seriously. I
did, however, think 'Rykarda Parasol and the Tower Ravens' was possibly the most
perfect Goth band name imaginable (for its histrionic quality possibly beating
my niece’s accidentally-created The Rejects of Lydia). It was only much later
that I heard more of Ms Parasol’s output and found I liked it more than I
anticipated. So here is more about her. Rykarda Parasol, incidentally, is her
real name, which one can consider a bonus gift from life.
Naturally she rejected the G-word as soon as other people
began to apply it to her rather than herself. ‘Goth folk’, a label slapped on
her music early on, is certainly completely unhelpful. She prefers ‘rock noir’
which is possibly not much more informative since while some of her tracks are
rocky, many aren’t; but as it suggests a certain cinematic quality by
its resonance with ‘film noir’, and by locating the Parasol musical world at
the complex, thoughtful end of the spectrum, it does get us somewhere. She
describes her work as ‘Edith Piaf meets Nick Cave meets Johnny Cash meets the
Velvet Underground’, and you can hear echoes of all those in her voice and
music, as well as Siouxsie Sioux, Billie Holiday and Diamanda Galás; but that’s
not much of a surprise. Any woman who sings low in her register about
problematic topics will pick up those resemblances. Her namechecking Nick Cave
is repeated by many reviewers, but again they’re very different artists; Parasol
articulates a female, and less violent, more melancholy, experience, while for
Cave women are almost always victims or muses. In fact, the artist I think of
most in relation to Parasol is Lana del Rey, though Parasol’s voice is much
more animated and her music more complex, and the comparison holds best for her first
two albums which, like much of del Rey’s work, seem designed to accompany a
night drive along an interstate highway somewhere in the empty US landscape. Parasol is what del Rey might aspire to be when she grows up.
Early on she was compared to PJ Harvey (the suggestion ‘doesn’t make me want to throw myself out of a window’, she answered), but
although, again, there are echoes between the two, Parasol’s style is really
very different and her intentions more so. Harvey has spent her career squirming uncomfortably in interviews and deflecting any suggestion that
her work is autobiographical; Parasol has, at least on the face of it, a Californian confidence and self-possession
(once being filmed in bed for an interview with an Oregon-based magazine) and,
in contrast, I suspect she may stress, rather than downplay, the extent to which her music is about
her. Harvey is absolutely dedicated to the work of being a musician, sometimes
to the exclusion of anything else, while Parasol states ‘music is not my life,
but because I have a life I am able to give my experiences to it.’ I’m going to
resist the temptation to pit the two artists against each other, but will
return to this particular theme.
That deliciously Gothy name of the Tower Ravens refers to a
band lineup which Parasol states only existed temporarily and with which she
never recorded. She says she began writing music in about 2001 and one
interview suggests she was asked to join a band whose singer had absconded,
only to find herself its lead and eventually the sole remaining member, since
when (like Harvey) she’s assembled shifting groups of musicians to play her compositions.
Parasol’s first venture into recording, a sort of calling-card really, was the
2003 EP Here She Comes (allmusic.com gives a date of 2005) and there have been
four full albums since. What she was doing before then, given that she was 33
when the EP came out, has never been touched on. She ran an art
gallery-cum-performance-space called The Hive in San Francisco for a while, and
says her natural abilities lie in visual arts but how she may have used them
commercially over the years is anyone’s guess. She pays for the production of
her music herself (somehow), and mainly plays piano and guitar though has
ventured onto other instruments, especially when trying to do as much as
possible herself on her third album, Against the Sun.
You might get the impression from the very name Here She
Comes and the record artwork, all of which follows a similar pattern, that
Rykarda Parasol’s work forms an unfolding, preconceived project, but this wouldn't be entirely straightforward. The first song on the EP is titled ‘Here Come Misery I’ and there is clearly a joke here, but while each
recording has a distinct personality, reinforced by the artwork, they seem to
follow Parasol’s own sense of journeying and are apparently themed retrospectively.
Each picture features what we must assume is Parasol’s body, obscured by some
living thing. Our Hearts First Meet (2008) has as its motif the yellow rose,
appropriately as Texas forms the backdrop for some of the songs; the album is a
spare, wistful exploration of the American South and conflicted feelings and
experiences, the style alt-country as much as anything else. Two years later
For Blood and Wine followed, whose emblem is the poppy, the state flower of
California where Parasol and her family live, and a symbol of sleep and
intoxication; the music is lusher and more grandiose (‘One For Joy!’ has a
cabaret feel and Parasol’s voice veers between Siouxsie Sioux and Emilie
Autumn). Against the Sun (2013) turns introspective, the songs quieter and
pared down. The title is a joke, a reference to Parasol’s own name, and its
symbol is the mushroom, which grows quietly in the dark: even more playfully
the image of the singer on the sleeve carries a giant mushroom to shield her.
Here the setting is international, reflecting the fact that Parasol wrote much
of the music in Paris: Paris, Kiev, and hints of other places crop up in the
lyrics. The ‘fourth in the series’, The Color of Destruction (2015) is summarised by red coral, which Parasol invests with meanings of passion and life, and explores
the choice between ‘drowning or burning’ – the ship’s going down anyway, so will
you just sink or set it on fire first? The orchestration is smoother and more
assured than ever, and she invites guest voices to take part (though ‘Swans
Will Save’ (FBAW) is sung by a little girl). The whole twelve-year sequence
forms a coherent progress, something most unusual in popular
music.
How this relates to the artist’s own journey is uncertain
despite her insistence that her work is autobiographical. Some tracks refer to
experiences she’s talked about directly. ‘En Route’ (OHFM) arose, she says,
from the death of a former boyfriend in a motorcycle accident, while ‘Take Only
What You Can Carry’ (ATS) refers directly to her father’s survival of the
Holocaust. However, Parasol herself suggests that the flowers and other things
that obscure her form on the record artwork make the point that what the
listener is getting is not – usually – straightforward reportage, but something
more nuanced and skewed. The four albums depict a maturing from brittleness and
sorrow to determination and courage: on TCOD, she says, ‘Ms Parasol's narrator
at last opens her heart up to the world without concern to be loved, but to
love’. But confessional though that all sounds, the reference to the ‘narrator’
is a distancing mechanism which the singer uses more than once, in interviews
as well as publicity. Instead I think what she is doing is exploring how her
own life and experience intersects with human experience as a whole, and the
histories of America and her family: those are the subjects rather than
herself as such (hence her rejection of the description 'Americana' applied to her early work: she sees herself as tied to something wider than nationhood). For instance, the title of the gloriously sad ‘I Vahnt tou
beh Alohne’ (ATS) is a joke about Parasol’s own Swedish heritage: her mother,
like Greta Garbo whose line it was, is Swedish. And yet the song is clearly
embodying something serious and real, emotionally if not factually.
But is it any good, you may ask? Many listeners may find
Parasol’s work too self-conscious, but I don’t mind
self-conscious when it’s spiced with irony and musical interest. It’s a fine line
to tread, admittedly. Listen to ‘The Loneliest Girl in the World’ (TCOD), a
track which almost invites scorn: the orchestration is
grandiose, the vocal mannered, the lyrics scattered with French. In the
accompanying video Parasol wanders the streets of Paris with a handful of red
balloons and an unreadable expression like the Mona Lisa come to life. This is almost
micky-taking, but not quite: the near-humour wraps up the sentiment,
and in fact a lot of music that deals with complex subjects is like that. By
the time you get the stuff recorded, the original emotion that provoked it has
been polished and rounded until you really do need to acknowledge its
performative quality somehow.
When PJ Harvey hit 35 she seems to have realised that she’d
reached the end of the road artistically, and there was no satisfaction left in
simply mining her own feelings, or knocking her imagination against the products
of other people’s, for inspiration, and that she had to reach elsewhere. The
Color of Destruction is a lovely piece of work, but it’s so assured and smooth
that I wonder whether Rykarda Parasol has come to the same point, and what, if
anything, might follow. I hope something will.
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