Elizabeth Anka Vajagic - The pleasure of sadness

Deep voice, heart-stopping delivery, a past spent alongside GYBE: Elizabeth Anka Vajagic delivered an outstanding debut in 2004. Released by one of post-rock's cult labels, the Canadian Constellation, "Stand With The Stillness Of This Day" offered up gothic-folk madrigals of aching intensity. We spoke with the Montreal singer-songwriter, who claims the right to "give a voice to sadness" without giving up on irony...

by Claudio Fabretti

Let's not beat around the bush: Miss Vajagic struck us right in the heart with her debut album, a collection of slow, dark, deeply aching gothic-folk madrigals. Timeless music with an antique aftertaste, released - paradoxically - by the quintessentially ultra-modern Canadian label Constellation, which has for years been the overseas outpost of the post-rock scene.

The Montreal singer-songwriter bursts onto the scene like this, staking a serious claim to the title of rising star of female songwriting across the Atlantic, perhaps alongside that other folksinger with a heart stuck in winter, Marissa Nadler.

Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, from Montreal but of Croatian origin, with her deep voice and a strong fondness for nighttime hours, crafts a debut album that sits somewhere between the urban rock-blues of Polly Jean Harvey and the necrophile strain of Nina Nastasia. Stand With The Stillness Of This Day contains just seven tracks, mid-to-long in length, balanced between tradition and Constellation-brand dissonance: among the backing musicians, credited only by their initials in the bare-bones booklet, lurk illustrious figures such as Efrim Menuck of GY!BE and Beckie Foon of Silver Mt. Zion, intent on adding dissonances and shrill textures in minimal, freeze-dried doses to the funereal melodies of guitar, cello and piano that feed the songs.

It's the words, however, and the way they're delivered, that cement sounds of such different origins together and give weight to the emotions of a record with a powerful emotional charge: Vajagic's voice is capable of tying together the scattered, distant sounds of "Around Here" just as it can sustain the dark litany of strings and slow arpeggios of the splendid "With Hopes Lost"; elsewhere it rests by the fire of tradition like a PJ Harvey lost in the woods ("Why", "Sleep With Dried Up Tears"), and finally it gives substance to the straightforward beauty of "And The Sky Lay Still", which releases evocative Paisley echoes over a layer of dissonance, clinging to its verses while waiting for a refrain that never arrives. Empty spaces and pained notes: there's no denying this is a solid, well-built record, of hypnotic grace, intense but not to the point of iciness: with her voice that trembles and consoles, Miss Vajagic is certainly more fire than ice, and knows how to deliver white-hot emotion.

If on Stand With The Stillness Of This Day the post-rock attitude was only sketched in, through the sparse instrumental contributions of some of the most renowned musicians on the Montreal scene, on the subsequent EP Nostalgia Pain (2005), again released by Constellation, Vajagic seems to want to plunge back into the musical humus in which she came of age alongside groups like Godspeed You Black Emperor and Silver Mt. Zion. Here, then, are two long, hyper-extended tracks, chiselled out of thin layers of noise and string flourishes, with acoustic guitar trying to trace a thin harmonic cartilage.

Both recorded during the sessions for Stand With The Stillness Of This Day, with musicians such as Sam Shalabi (guitar), Michel Langevin (drums) and Fluffy Erskine (wind instruments), and with a pronounced taste for improvisation, "Nostalgia" (over 17 minutes) and "Pain" (12'42") wrap the chilling laments of a girl who loves to walk through cemeteries in a blanket of light dissonance and noise. Textures that are mostly soft and spectral, but ready to turn stormy as mood and vocals shift. The young Croatian-Canadian vocalist, in fact, favours sudden shifts in register, ranging from a tremulous falsetto to striking guttural "glissandos". Fairy/ogre metamorphoses that bring to mind the childhood psychodramas of Shannon Wright and Kate Bush, or even the "satanic litanies" of Diamanda Galas.

And it's undoubtedly Elizabeth's performances that are the most significant aspect of tracks that sometimes end up tangled in a kind of showing-off that feels somewhat pointless (the tail of assorted noise and improvisation on "Nostalgia", which feels very "indie" but grows a bit tiresome after a while, or the galloping guitar work of "Pain", punctuated by edgy, nerve-wracked drumming). The result is that the third track – that "Beneath Quiet Mornings" which Elizabeth told us she recorded at home on a 4-track in the morning, sitting on the floor in her pyjamas – turns out, in its simplicity, to perhaps be the most effective of the three: an arpeggiated guitar, evocative vocal lines and an elusive melody frame a lovely, intimate sketch.

Nostalgia Pain should be taken for what it is: a further, small showcase of Vajagic's great vocal and interpretive skills and the improvisational chops of her crew of post-rock musicians. For true confirmation of the gem that was her debut album, though, we'll have to wait for her next long-player.

Contributions by Salvatore Patti (Musicboom)