CARLA DAL FORNO - Confession LP

CD also available.

Intimate, raw and emotionally unsettling, Carla Dal Forno's eagerly awaited fourth album chews over fantasy and reality over a sequence of rattly, dub-inflected DIY pop vignettes recorded in an abandoned hospital.

If Dal Forno's last album was her way of adjusting to physical upset after relocating from the big city to Castlemaine, then Confession turns her gaze inwards, reflecting on the emotional eruptions and disruptions that followed a friendship's evolution into romance. On previous records, Dal Forno's  voice was often drowned in reverb, sketched in ethereal strokes around words. Here, she's more exposed, bringing the airiness of Antipodean twee/jangle pop into her well-established psychedelic swatch book of Young Marble Giants, Broadcast, Gareth Williams and Mary Currie. 

The shift in texture from the production side sounds so fully evolved that you'd swear her songs have always been this brittle and dreamy and her voice, unguarded and blunt, finally sits proud in the mix, supported by precise, creaky structures. Of course, her choice of location for the recording definitely helps grease the wheels; 'Confession' was dubbed in a studio nestled between the "long corridors, humming lights and emptied rooms" of the old Castlemaine Hospital, a 1930s building that's been decommissioned since around 2000 and is rumored to be haunted. Dal Forno uses the space to her advantage: the echoes become markers for her new reality, blocked in by a deafening inner voice. "I have these thoughts that don't end," she professes on the opening track. "Shouldn't want to kiss you but I do / Shouldn't want to touch you but I miss you all the time." She describes a type of longing that's scarred by shame over a fragile beatbox, a post-punk bassline and mewling analog synths - Dal Forno reckons with her inner demons, rationalising and deconstructing the jealousy, confusion and euphoria of a fresh connection.