Album of the week with Tara Nome Doyle: The big tingle and crawl

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Musician Tara Nome Doyle, album cover of »Vaermin«: Embrace the Sneaky

Photo: Sonja Stadelmaier / Modern Recordings

Album of the week:

It's always amazing when you hear a new album and feel that an artist no longer makes compromises once they've learned to trust their creative voice so much that sensational power and sovereignty grow from it.

Berlin-based singer and musician Tara Nome Doyle seems to have reached that point with her second album.

»Vaermin« – pests – is a concept album about a love story that begins brightly, ends darkly and finds fulfillment in the twilight.

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It's a really big drama, told with the smallest crawling creatures: the song titles are titled like all sorts of critters and are also about them - "Spider", "Worms", "Caterpillar", "Leeches", "Moth", "Snail" or "Mosquito" . The great tingling and crawling triggers flight reflexes in some, arachnophobics and other disgust-prone people need strong nerves if they want to venture into Tara Nome Doyle's teeming emotional world - if they dare, however, they will be rewarded with fascinating, redeeming beauty.

»Vaermin« is about exactly this contradiction, the two sides of goosebumps, the nice shudder and the horrified shaking. It is about recognizing and embracing the downsides in oneself and the other in the pursuit of pure innocence and idealized love. We are »obsessed with pain but searching for pleasure/ Surrounded by good but searching for better«, is how Doyle describes this all-too-human instinct in one of her many precise text couplets to suppress the unwanted vermin of the soul. But what if you hug her? »What if we welcome the vermin?«, she asks in the title song to the contemplative sounds of the church organ, loosely based on the psychoanalyst CG Jung and his theories on »shadows« and »persona«:Wouldn't one then come to a much more honest and balanced relationship with oneself and thus also with one's fellow human beings?

Of course that's a question that seems to have been born out of the lockdown, out of inner self-reflection in the living room jail, alone at the piano in Kreuzberg, where Doyle actually writes most of her songs. If you want, you can even take all of this out of the context of a private negotiation of love affairs and relate it to the social gap of mutual misunderstanding, which has widened alarmingly in times of the pandemic. However, Tara Nome Doyle already dealt with Jung's theories on her debut album "Alchemy", which was also great, but did not yet have the self-confidence and serenity that "Vaermin" now impressively demonstrates.

If all this seems too academic to you, you just have to get involved with Doyle's voice, which alternates between whispering head tones and bloodcurdling deep chest tones - and with the power of her compositions, which are both delicate and rousing at the same time. Already in the first track, »Leeches I«, she fearlessly puts her back to the wall, devoting herself to a new love, but also to her art: »Take my body to the shooting ground«, she sings, »'cause I'll bleed if you want me to" - Put me on the execution ground, I'll bleed for you if you want it. In this prayer for the leeches, she moves from soft, sensual deep sighs to the most painful howl, the music surges from the simmering of the organ in the quiet little room into a wide space in which piano chords and percussion whirl freely.In Doyle's pop concept, musical role models such as Kate Bush and Tori Amos meet chamber music and Radiohead's art rock, which often also digs into the subconscious.

The singer with Norwegian-Irish roots was discovered in 2016 at the age of 19 by the Berlin soundtrack curator and part-time natural wine agent Martin Hossbach at the final gala of a stage art academy.

Hossbach released »Alchemy« on his own label after a few first singles.

The debut was critically acclaimed in 2020 and opened the door to a musical career for the now 24-year-old, which has spanned numerous interdisciplinary projects and which after "Vaermin" should no longer be limited to Germany.

The new album was produced by Simon Goff, who won a Grammy for his work on Hildur Guðnadóttir's »Chernobyl« soundtrack.

Musicians include members of Gang of Four and the Bad Seeds.

For the soundtrack of the Netflix film »Munich – In the View of War«, which has just started, Doyle wrote a song together with the British composer Isobel Waller-Bridge (»Fleabag«), which she sang in German for the first time.

So you're eagerly awaiting the next steps, a duet with Thom Yorke for example.

Vocals for the film scores by Jonny Greenwood?

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Tara Nome Doyle

»Vaermin«

Label: Modern Recordings

Label: Modern Recordings

approx. €16.99

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01/28/2022 4:33 p.m

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But first you have to immerse yourself in "Vaermin", in the thunderous empowerment gesture of "Moth", the emotional ambush scenario of "Spider" or the much too short "Worms", which you would like to hear soon in the endless techno remix .

Only "Crow" with its strangely unnecessary electronic vocal shuffling ("Morning Comsch too schoon") is out of the ordinary.

No wonder that in the end she has to audibly breathe into the microphone herself.

For everything else, what the seductress Tara Nome Doyle sings with grandiose creepyness in »Caterpillar« applies: »Don't try to flee/ Embrace quarantine/ You don't need friends/ You just need me«.

Already one of the most beautiful pop offers of the year.

(9.0)