My solo Album “Sugar” is out now via subsidized time
Listen to/buy the Album on Bandcamp.
Listen to Sugar on all Streaming Platforms.
Rather rarely, life throws happy surprises at you. Which would be: you open a door and on the other side it looks nothing like you'd expect. It looks better than everything you could have imagined beforehand. Lena Geue's release is full of these tiny instances. All over little wonders. An endless cabinet of doors and drawers revealing something bigger piece by piece.
The multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer is as comfortable with the guitar, synthesizers and violin as she is with words. And her voice presents us with a sound world that is as lush as it is focused.
Though the final result is polished and sparkles with the glimmer of lengthy post-production, everything started as an improvisation. For every song Lena invited a guest and collaborator from rather different backgrounds and - depending on the type of workflow - layed down the foundation. May it be structurally, sonically or just everything. What is a lengthy process has clearly elevated the album in its openness. It never gets caught up in itself.
But what’s at the center of this? It’s not a technicality, not a programme, nor is it a specific story that’s told. It’s more a magic spell that ties it all together: a certain playfulness, the endless influx of small ideas, a constant forward motion. An optimistic rush where the optimism is not a state but draws from continual movement.
All this is not eclectic, although it’s tough to say what the boundaries are. There are clear stylistic force fields, namely singer/songwriter (through the years) and avant-pop (whatever that is), but even those are galaxies when an album is a solar system. So here the sun, the point where everything gravitates to, might just be Lena Geue and the time spent crafting these eight songs.
As she sings “the need of change has been driving me”, we couldn't be more grateful that after years of allowing these tracks to change and grow, she brought them to the form that is this album, alive and breathing.
