STRIDULUM II (ZOLA JESUS ALBUM)
Stridulum II is the second full-length studio album by Zola Jesus
This album takes all six songs from the Stridulum EP with all four songs from the Valusia EP. The cover art for this album is modified from the cover art of Stridulum.
BACKGROUND
Stridulum II, is an album which explores good and evil, extreme behaviour and how doing something small can make a big change. This was all inspired by Giulio Paradisi's 1979 film Stridulum.
Zola Jesus loves Giulio Paradisi's Stridulum because its ambitious, confusing and beautiful. It's not a particularly well-made film, it's certainly isn't very linear and doesn't always come across as easy to understand, but that's because Giulio Paradisi is trying to squeeze in as much as he can. Overall, at the core of the film is a battle between good and evil.
Zola Jesus refers to the scene when Goodness (John Huston) tries to rescue the film's heroine by getting rid of her bad side and when doves fall from the sky. That scene and the soundtrack which accompany it both stand out. Bits and pieces of the music are used in the track Stridulum.
The song Manifest Destiny was used in the trailer for Neill Blomkamp's film Elysium.
RECEPTION
Danilova's classically trained voice is the deadliest weapon in her Warchest. Its pretty profound... Zola Jesus sandblasts her songs clean of the lo-fi trappings of the spoils, and let her incredible voice shine through the arrangements, being stripped back to the basics, which contain a drum machine and synth pads. The focus is on the songs and they don't disappoint. Their simplicity, vulnerability and directness are well beyond Danilova’s years. Zola Jesus seems like an exciting project, and if Danilova keeps improving at this, her sophomore album proper will be simply incredible. This spellbinding collection of hypnotic power comes from Danilova's vocal range. Her voice can be described like a spirit unable to cross over, forlorn and forsaken, reciting her litany of love and regret, even if the slightness of sound occasionally threatens to undermine the record's fragile veil of magic.
Danilova has a way with a lyric, the way that the greatest pop stars do, of saying something simple that could mean so much to so many – conveying the universal in one chorus or a snatch of verse. Danilova's voice swallows you up, it enraptures you. Its more than anything else in her mind blowing arsenal, and its what drags you in and doesn't let you go. It's the voice of a diva in the truest sense of the word, a combinaton of Maria Callas and Florence Welch, designed to be sung wherever Danilova wants to go: opera houses or Glastonbury. It's instantly transfixing. This album found Jesus going away from her Avant-Garde early recordings and onto direct songwriting and pithier instrumentation, with surprising results.
What stands out on Stridulum II, is that the vocals are placed slap bang in the middle of the mix. While influences are drawn largely from the same places as before, the instrumentation this time round has been softened, the edges are rounded, and the sound is enhanced beyond a mere studio clean-up job.
Zola Jesus has thrown back the veils of feral scuzz and grime that swamped many of her earlier recordings, a corollary of her love for early industrial music and power electronics and achieved in some tracks anthemic clarity and accessibility. Without the wizard’s curtain of feverish fuzz to hide behind, her compositions can appear vulnerable, hollow and frail.
This album has demonstrated the perils of revisiting the past, especially if, as is undoubtedly the case with Danilova, you were too young to live through it first time round.
Overall, the album could be described as a dark masterpiece.