Here, There

There are countless intimate, fret-noise-fuelled records from singer-guitarists across the history of modern popular music, but solo piano and voice releases remain a comparative rarity - It's hard to imagine an artist better equipped to contribute to this canon than France-based singer, keyboardist, and composer Melissa Weikart.

A conservatory-trained classical pianist and improviser, Weikart's accompaniment on her debut album, Here, There, swells to catharses of orchestral proportions; it's usually easy to forget this is the work of just one player. Here, adding additional instruments also might obscure some of this bold and playful record's most compelling interplay: the way Weikart's hands frequently seem to move out of correspondence with each other, reaching for conflicting rhythms and key areas. For all the ambition and virtuosity of these compositions, Here, There is fundamentally a study in restraint. The songs seem to unfold spontaneously before they unravel; they drop the listener into the middle of moments of obsessive self-analysis. Weikart's lyrical trajectories are always effortless to follow - palpable and sympathetic even in the context of music which makes a point of avoiding the familiar.