Wednesday, 19 September 2018

Take Only What You Can Carry: the ecstatic melancholy of Rykarda Parasol

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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