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Merveilleuse - Demo Recordings
Well, who said that this social networking malarkey is mostly pointless? It could have been me at one point but after stumbling upon Merveilleuse on Twitter I must retract any notion of this thought. I found somebody who made music for truly self assuring reasons.
In 2006 Kristen Williams, aka Merveilleuse, suffered a serious bout of illness. During this long period of uncertainty, Kristen explains that the illness gave her a year of self questioning as to what would give her the most self satisfaction. And thus, Merveileuse was born.
A love of Curve, Pete Murphy and Talk Talk gave Kristen the musical inspiration and paths to follow. With a tenacious guile in the face of adversity, Williams took up every instrument needed to form the songs, moods and feelings she wanted to express and the four track demo I received is testament to a genuinely talented individual who conveys heartbreaking emotion with an uplifting spiky back-beat.
Here Kristen Williams tells us all about her music:
"I make pop music. I cringe at the very thought of it (considering the general perceptions of pop music), and yet it's what I do. My music comes from an honest place. I write about my experiences -- I write to process and cope with my life. I hope there is an audience out there that can appreciate genuine sentiments in pop format, there's something subversive about it.
Thematically, my creativity revolves around love. Many different kinds of love, but when you strip it back, love is the common element. There are a few exceptions to this in my music, but even when I write about abstract ideas, I tend to personify them and write as if I have a relationship with that personified abstract. Love, and the relationship dynamics of love, are simply what I find most interesting.
Sonically, my most significant influences are probably Depeche Mode, Curve, Smashing Pumpkins, and The Smiths. I have a bit of a split personality, sometimes my music is more synth driven -- that's when I can hear the Depeche Mode influence -- and when the music is more guitar driven, I can hear the influence of Billy Corgan or Johnny Marr.
Here Kristen talks about the tracks that make up here demo:
"Oh Lover, Break Me" -- This was the first track I finished. Ironically, it is probably the most complicated...there are some strange chords in this song. But in the "middle 8" and the outro, I can hear Johnny Marr's influence. In The Smith's "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" I also think the guitar work sounds like rain. In this song I wanted my guitar to sound like rain. The song is about a masochistic kind of love, and taking pleasure in the destructive dynamic of that particular relationship. It is more literal than I'd like to admit. The concept and the lyrics came first, the music later, maybe that is why the music was so complicated.
"I Want Your Love " -- I wanted to write a song that pulsed, a dance song. One thing I love about Depeche Mode, particularly the singles off "Music For The Masses", is the building momentum and the driving beats. "Behind The Wheel" is a good example of the type of sound that inspired me. "I Want Your Love" is pretty stripped back, there is the beat, a glockenspiel, a swirling synth sound that fades in and out, and couple creepy guitar fills. The lyrics are simple and to the point. They were a reply to something a guy said to me once, that the things I didn't know about him would turn me away. My reply was that although I fear those things, and although those things eventually inspire hate in me, I want his love anyway -- a selfish sentiment, a self-destructive sentiment. The music and lyrics were written simultaneously.
"Endlessly" -- the vocal melody was the first thing that came to me. I sort of sat on it for a while, with no words and no music. I read the word "endlessly" somewhere and I thought the word sounded good in my melody and wrote the rest of the lyrics around the idea of a secret devotion to someone, how having that secret is powerful and fulfilling in ways that the reality of that relationship is probably not. The song is guitar driven, to me the octave chord layering is very Billy Corgan, but the guitar solo sounds more like something from The Cure. This song has the drum programming I am most proud of because I hate programming beats.
"Falling Is Forever" - "Falling Is Forever" was the result of an experiment in time management. I wanted to write, arrange, perform, record, mix, master, and have a track finished and up-streaming in a single week. "Falling Is Forever" took exactly 7 days from the first word written, to when it was uploaded on Myspace. I kept the people that were following me on Twitter updated, even uploading the original video of me arranging the song and writing the (then) unfinished lyrics. The song is a lyrical plea, I wanted the other person I was writing about to understand the gravity of what we had. This song is performed entirely on a microKORG."
7.5/10
Kristen's Music page
Introduction by Nicky and all other words Kristen Williams.
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