Nouela by Angel Ceballos
Your Girl In Music cannot get over the new noise from Nouela, the half Korean, half norse spirited songstress ‘from’ Seattle (by way of Korea) who is poised to finally revolutionize Indie Girl Rock in the early 2010′s. Listen for yourself, and feel the elation bubble in your veins and just try to not dance along – in fact, yours truly double dawg dares you to successfully refrain from singing along before the song is over. It sounds like an easy win for you, ’cause you don’t know the words yet, but trust us: the sound is so infectious, you’ll catch yourself making up what you think her next thought is one minute in, and oddly, you’ll be intuiting her verses correctly. Or was that just us? Either way: listen, revell, share.
It absolutely does not hurt that Nouela was born to two hardcore musicians hailing from Juliard and Princeton, or that she cut her first musical teeth fronting some of Seattle’s most sacred indie treasures. But Chants is something even more special to behold. The sonic terrain of Chants appears like the dark landscape of a musically Darwinian island that mirrors Nouela’s upbringing: an enigmatic and isolated place where Carole King’s Tapestry has been allowed to co-mingle for countless generations with PJ Harvey’s To Bring you My Love and Fiona Apple’s Tidal. What emerges is a unique body of music that is both ambitious without being self-indulgent and vulnerable without being piteous. Chants is a musical flood of feelings and emotions set to mark its own birth, persist and endure.