White Poppy, the “experimental therapeutic pop” project from British Columbian inner-peacenik Crystal Dorval, has been evolving fresh forms for a couple years now. Last winter, packing a satchel full of four-track tapes, she ventured out from her bedroom haven and boarded a boat across the Strait of Georgia to the town of Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island, to The Noise Floor Recording Studio, to mastermind and mix the ten deluxe, delirious dream-gaze gems comprising her self-titled full-length debut. Fusing the warm, washed tonalities of her earliest cassette- blurred lotus meditations with a richer range of glittering guitar gestures, sky-way keyboard cascades and neonviolet vocal refractions, White Poppy captures the catchy, dizzy fuzz and textured, opiated heights of Dorval’s deceptively vulnerable songcraft. The see-sawing balance of faded, forlorn freefalling (“Emotional Intelligence,” “Existential Angst”) with buoyant, blissed independence-pop (“Wear Me Away,” “Without Answers”) conjures a real rainbow mood ring three-dimensionality, a kaleidoscope of intimate drifter soul. True-gaze for a newer age.
Limited to 480 copies.