Rating: 4 / 5 stars
There is a stillness about the farmlands scattered across Wisconsin that really appealed to the grandparents of singer-songwriter Nika Roza Danilova, known by her stage name Zola Jesus. Unlike most people moving to America, they were attracted to the peace and quiet they remembered back in Odessa, Ukraine. It is the kind of quiet that most people would find unsettling, especially to those used to living in a noisy city landscape. For Danilova, the quiet was where she found her peace. It was the way things always were for her growing up.
“I had a very rich imagination and a rich inner life,” she explains, in an interview with “Elle Magazine.” “From a very young age, I just learned how to entertain myself.”
It was this silence that made her feel disconnected from the rest of her peers. Danilova often describes feeling very reserved as a child, rarely talking to kids her own age and living in a world of her own. It was in this other world that her deep, musically-inclined side kept her moving forward. Danilova released her first album under the moniker of Zola Jesus in 2009, entitled “The Spoils,” while majoring in business at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her style then was dynamic, pulling from electronic, industrial and classical music, mixing it all together with a gothic attitude and aesthetic.
“Okovi,” her latest project, is the much-anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed “Taiga,” which dropped in late 2014. Since then, a lot has happened in Danilova’s personal life: multiples brushes with death, a close friend receiving a cancer diagnosis, and the weight of depression were pulling her into a sort of deep rut. A windowless room with no source of light. “Okovi” sees the walls of that room fly right off, following up “Taiga” with arguably the most visceral, powerful work she has released up to this point.
The track “Witness” is easily the best from “Okovi,” taking a warm string quartet and clashing it against biting, industrial drums. Danilova’s vocals are dry and upfront, lacking the usual effects she likes to layer on top of them.
“To be witness, to those deep, deep wounds,” she sings with a slight falsetto, describing what it was like to finally let her emotions out to somebody close to her.
“Soak” is a track that feels heavily inspired by a lot of popular music in the late ‘90s, including breakbeat drum loops and intense, grainy noise filling in the gaps. Massive Attack is a band that comes to mind, while Danilova’s vocals have the sort of raw, unedited quality to them that suggest Björk was possibly a heavy influence.
Some tracks that fell a little short were ones that recycled trends from a lot of today’s popular music and ones that were not mixed together. For example, “Siphon” does not really bring much to the table with song structure or production and just mulches along exactly how the listener would expect it to. It marks a contrast to the rest of the album, which is bold and experimental.
To everyone who decided to skip to the last paragraph of this review: give this album a try. Her name and her style (especially her name) are polarizing and sort of hard to get into at first, but she has such a diverse sound that her talent really starts to shine through after more listens.
