FACT Magazine Tess Roby’s operatic Beacon is a synth-laced tribute to family and loss @ Musique Non Stop |
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Posted: 30 May 2018 10:44 AM PDT
FACT Rated is our series digging into the sounds and stories of the most vital breaking artists around right now. This week Claire Lobenfeld Claire Lobenfeld speaks to Italians Do It Better artist Tess Roby. Singer-synthesist Tess Roby has been surrounded by music since she was a little girl. Her mother, who was from New Brunswick, played Acadian folk music and her father, a Wigan native who passed away four years ago, was a musician, as well. The family piano lived in the kitchen of her childhood home in Toronto where, twice a year, they hosted a "kitchen party": a gathering where each attendee brings over a musical instrument to play, dance, and drink with each other throughout the night. "It's definitely a maritime thing," Roby says over the phone from her place in Montréal. "Every Christmas, we still have one." Unlike the anything-goes communal atmosphere of a kitchen party, Roby's debut album Beacon, released earlier this year by Italians Do It Better, was conceived in private. This included her brother Eliot, who she eventually invited to collaborate with her on the album and who plays with her live now. “I didn't realize I was keeping it so secret,” she says. “When I did eventually start to show people, people didn't necessarily know how to categorize the music.” It is true that Beacon is hard to put a finger on. Roby, herself, notes that she was listening to a lot of Brian Eno and Cocteau Twins when she was writing the album, and that she has been compared to Kate Bush, Björk and Nico, and while echoes of all those artists can be heard in her music, there is no pantomime. Many songs have guitar that is reminiscent of mathier indie rock riffs, but they are just hints. It makes a lot of sense when she says that her main influence for the album was “trying to envision the landscape of England within the songs.” What standouts most about the record is Roby’s vocals. They are deep and luscious, almost the opposite of her lithe synth work, but also a heady complement. Roby credits this to having spent eight years of her childhood as a member of the Canadian Children's Opera Company. |
