It'd be overstating it to say that Bic Runga is a totemic artist for me, but her music has run through a lot of my life, even soundtracked much of it in the background, despite never having really become laden with any specific strong associations (which might be just as well, in some ways). "Sway" and Drive pierced me in high school, and I kept on listening to them at intervals; near the end of uni, I belatedly picked up Beautiful Collision at around the time that my tastes were coalescing around a lot of that kind of pretty, melancholy-edged female singer-songwriter stuff; and then came the lovely Birds (*), easily her most mature and best to that point. And it seemed that, infrequently but somehow consistently, her songs would appear on mix cds, float out from the radio, come up on an ipod shuffle - always there, each time winding just a bit more of a personal thread around her music for me.
Anyhow, there's a new one out, Belle, and it's another good one. It's another album of elegant, finely crafted and performed adult alternative pop, perhaps a bit more experimental and a bit more sophisticated than the previous three; it starts sprightly, and then explores a range of other musical moods, from the classicism of "If You Really Do", through the Morricone-esque opening and mysterious swirl of "This Girl's Prepared For War" and the shimmery "Darkness All Around Us", on which Runga takes a back seat to collaborator/producer Kody Nielson (to pick out my favourites)...also, the dream-like two minute title track is honestly just a little bit magical, a gossamer, ethereal moment that sticks in the mind, as much for the otherworldly mood it invokes as for its wistful melody.
Anyhow, there's a new one out, Belle, and it's another good one. It's another album of elegant, finely crafted and performed adult alternative pop, perhaps a bit more experimental and a bit more sophisticated than the previous three; it starts sprightly, and then explores a range of other musical moods, from the classicism of "If You Really Do", through the Morricone-esque opening and mysterious swirl of "This Girl's Prepared For War" and the shimmery "Darkness All Around Us", on which Runga takes a back seat to collaborator/producer Kody Nielson (to pick out my favourites)...also, the dream-like two minute title track is honestly just a little bit magical, a gossamer, ethereal moment that sticks in the mind, as much for the otherworldly mood it invokes as for its wistful melody.
