Selva

Taking influence from sounds and styles ranging from the Laurel Canyon scene to exotica and film scores by likes of Morricone and Badalamenti, onetime working jazz vocalist Marta Del Grandi introduced her highly stylized art pop on Until We Fossilize in 2021. It was self-produced in her native Italy with contributions from collaborators in Brooklyn. While that albums subject matter was heavily inspired by world travel, she followed it up two years later with the more personal Selva (Italian for "forest"). For this album, she enlisted a co-producer, Bert Vliegen (Sophia, Whispering Sons), who helped her fashion a more muscular, bass-clef-heavy sound that was tracked in Ghent, Belgium. The set list opens with a section of off-center a cappella, multi-tracked by Del Grandi before exacting, unison bass and synth arpeggios lay down a tense backdrop for lyrics like, "There I found you/Huddled in your wounded heart/Acting like I wasn’t there." That song, "Mata Hari," soon expands to include a driving drum kit, a booming low drum, brass, woodwinds, guitars, and more, as the singer reflects on the value of love ("If not for love we’d be just like shadows"). Throughout the rest of Selva, art songs like the part-chant, partly cacophonous "Snapdragon," the chamber piece "Polar Bear Village," and the Italian-language title track, with its heavily edited singing and whispering voices, are balanced by more structured pop like the grungy, swaying rock ballad "Stay," the lilting synth folk entry "Marble Season," and the earnest "Two Halves," which ornaments strummed acoustic guitar with murmuring electronic noise ("I’m divided into two halves/One’s humming to herself/And one needs to show them"). After keeping listeners both beguiled and off-balance through 11 tracks, Selva ends with the bittersweet, organ-guided "End of the World, Pt. 2," in which Del Grandi literally dreams of having it all as she drifts off to sleep. ~ Marcy Donelson