Zola Jesus – Conatus (Sacred Bones Records)
As twenty years have come and gone since the close of the 1980s, it's interesting to see the permutations of that decade's culture that have continued to resonate, and how each has managed to evolve, bearing less similarity to its initial form with each passing year. Social conservatism has fallen in and out of favor, despite the largely prosperous years when those who would at least pay lip-service to slightly left-of-center ideas held the most power. Brightly-colored clothing and gravity-defying haircuts have inexplicably never wholly succumbed to good taste. And musicians like Lady Gaga and Kanye West have often found themselves saddled with the sort of comparisons to Madonna and Prince (respectively) that seem to come part and parcel with attempting a mass-culture iconoclasm. Retrospective takes on the decade's output aren't wholly the territory of mainstream artists either. One could call to mind the “hypnagogic pop” (or whatever they're calling it at The Wire) of artists like Oneohtrix Point Never, a half-remembered pastiche of Me Decade commercial jingles and Giorgio Moroder soundtracks reconfigured into a hazy, post-shoegaze psychedelia, or the manner in which a group like Chromeo is able to draw as equally from Hall & Oates as from Rick James. Had these artists been creating music concurrent to those from whose work they drew, the influences may have seemed incongruous, but in the obscuring haze of distant memory, disparities become reconciled and juxtapositions seem less strange. Nika Danilova, the singer and composer behind Zola Jesus, provides something of a twist on this idea. Not even a year old when the 1980s met their end, she has spent the past few years weaving together some seemingly varied strains of the decade's music, experienced second-hand through her parents' record collection, into a whole that's cohesive enough that a listener might be inclined to forget that at one point, artists as varied as Throbbing Gristle and Kate Bush, Cocteau Twins and Swans were not seen as the readily compatible elements that they are in Danilova's hands.
Conatus, the most recent Zola Jesus release, finds Danilova mining similar territory as on previous albums, albeit with a slightly more inviting approach. Whereas earlier efforts maintained the sort of icy aloofness that could be seen as one of the rare connecting threads between many of her influences, the newest has a melodic accessibility that, while certainly represented on preceding albums, has rarely been as well-developed. There is little of the cavernous production and cathartic outpouring of The Spoils or the bleak monochrome of Stridulum, with Danilova and multi-instrumentalist collaborator Brian Foote employing a broader sonic palette that augments the standard synthesizer cascades with a string section and a live drummer, additions that help to push the music beyond a bedroom electronic project towards something more varied and compelling.
Some of the material present on Conatus differs only slightly from previous material – a song like “Vessel” is separated from something that could have popped up on any earlier Zola Jesus release only by a stuttering, choppy vocal loop – but some reach further afield. Songs like “Skin” or the curiously titled “Lick The Palm Of A Burning Handshake” lean heavily on piano arrangements, the former a sedate ballad, the latter a striking mid-tempo piece that may well be Danilova's catchiest song to date. Others, “Seekir” for instance, come closer to dance music than Zola Jesus has yet, with a robotic beat not far removed from the early electro acts who repositioned Kraftwerk for purposes other than a jaunt down the autobahn. The real strength of the album lies within the songwriting, however, an asset that's afforded a more central focus than on any previous albums. When a listener starts to pinpoint exactly where some of the source material originates, be it the synth-pop, the piano balladry, or the industrial flourishes (toned down though they may be) it might seem like too artificial a melange, except that all the material is swathed in the sort of vocal hooks that bestow upon the proceedings an accessibility that might seem unexpected given the generally morose tone of Zola Jesus' music and the breadth of her influences.
Ultimately, it's not difficult to throw on some neon clothing and peck out notes on a Casio. But genuinely paying tribute to an era, rather than simply aping some of its more recognizable characteristics, is a whole different matter. While it often seems that the vast majority of the sources from which Nika Danilova draws for Zola Jesus originate in a fairly specific period of time, her music never comes across as a cheap nostalgia ploy. It may disregard historicity's barriers and constructs, but in the process it brings many of its predecessors' best elements into the present. Perhaps because she never experienced much of the era first-hand, or possibly because she is beginning to reach a stage where her songwriting is deepening and is able to more wholly incorporate the work of her antecedents, Conatus comes off as a better developed album than any of her previous efforts.