Loud City Song
Don\'t get the wrong idea—just because Julia Holter has expanded her sound and her scope for her third album, *Loud City Song*, it doesn\'t mean she\'s leaped ill-advisedly into entirely foreign waters. It\'s not like the electronic art-pop auteur has gone country or something—just that after earning attention with the previous year\'s *Ekstasis* and finding herself on a larger label with more ears angled her way, she decided to open things out a bit. Holter\'s hypnotic, blown-glass vocal tones and gracefully angular, electro-minimalist approach to making music are still the defining factors here, but this album feels richer and more varied than its predecessor. Touches like the jazzy acoustic bass of \"In the Green Wild,\" the staccato horn section punctuating the appropriately titled \"Horns Surrounding Me,\" and the late-night piano languor of \"He\'s Running Through My Eyes\" all enhance Holter\'s approach. When she lays into an ambient-pop version of Barbara Lewis\'s \'60s soul hit \"Hello Stranger,\" it seems like there\'s nothing she can\'t do if she sets her mind to it.
Loud City Song is the new studio recording by Los Angeles based artist Julia Holter. The album is her third full length release in as many years – following 2011’s groundbreaking debut Tragedy and last year’s follow-up, the critically lauded Ekstasis. Her first studio album proper, Loud City Song is both a continuation and a furthering of the fiercely singular and focused vision displayed by its predecessors, taking as it does Holter’s rare gift for merging high concept, compositional prowess and experimentation with pop sensibility and applying it to a set of even more daringly beautiful arrangements and emotionally resonant songs. The songs were coaxed out and finessed as demos in Holter’s bedroom studio and then coalesced into one thrillingly cohesive experience by Holter and co-producer Cole Marsden Grief-Neill and an ensemble of Los Angeles musicians. The result is an album of enormous ambition - taking its cues from the likes of Joni Mitchell and the poetry of Frank O’Hara but forging those inspirations into something resolutely unique.
L.A. avant-pop musician Julia Holter's mesmerizing third album is her interpretation of Gigi-- the musical and the original 1944 novella. The collection's learned and erudite, but not in a way that talks down to the listener: Loud City Song is breezy, contemporarily resonant, and flutteringly alive. It's her first record for Domino, and the one most likely to turn skeptics to believers.
Personal and poignant without being wholly autobiographical, Holter's third album hugely rewards one's investment.
"There's a flavor to the sound of walking no one ever noticed before," Julia Holter sings at one point on her third album, Loud City Song, and if anyone could notice that, it would be her.
Julia Holter's third LP (following 2011's Tragedy, which was based on the Ancient Greek play Hippolytus, and the timeless Ekstasis) finds its muse in contemporary '50s cinema.
Loud City Song is that rare, refreshing, and inspiring album that simply aspires to be a world unto itself.
Clash reviews 'Loud City Song', the brilliant new album from Domino-signed songwriter Julia Holter.
Julia Holter ruminates on the shallow world of celebrity-obsessed media and the ultimate futility of it all, writes <strong>Harriet Gibsone</strong>