CARLA DAL FORNO - Confession

“Confession” opens with its best song. Buoyed by a broad, almost heroic bassline, “Going Out” has an immediate evocative power; Carla dal Forno glides over it with her unwavering delivery, letting the faintest cracks in her voice hint at suspicion. Just a few elements, precisely arranged, and a melody that seems to throw the landscape wide open even as it makes it less welcoming.
This is where the record reveals its own deception. On first listen, it seems almost the most inviting work of the Australian musician's career: light keyboards, elastic bass, dry but lively percussion; even her voice, once veiled in a post-punk haze, sounds closer now, clearer, at times even smiling. Yet behind this composure moves a feverish narrator, impassive in tone, her confessions already warped by desire and obsession.

The Melbourne songwriter's fourth album was conceived in Castlemaine, where she settled after years spent in Europe, and was recorded in a studio built inside a disused hospital. The place seems to have lent the record its own mental acoustics: isolation, empty corridors, days stretched thin. There's plenty of space left between the instruments, but that emptiness doesn't soothe anything; instead it becomes an echo chamber for thoughts that keep returning, mutating, and gradually taking over everything.

“Nighttime” moves with the flat cadence of a grown-up nursery rhyme: bass pushed to the fore, vocals almost narrative, attention fixed on the movements of the desired person to the point of brushing against a kind of surveillance. The title track shifts gear, bending into a ska inflection and an almost childlike lightness; the circular motion, however, thins out over time. The contrast with the obsessive substance of the lyrics is obvious, perhaps even too calculated. Worse are the four instrumentals scattered through the tracklist: decorative miniatures with no real reason to exist. “Drip Drop”, with its off-season funfair music-box tinkle, mostly leaves the impression of a pause placed exactly where more focus was needed.
The real songs, though, keep opening up new ground. “Under The Covers” wraps the domestic scene in a discreet electronic weave, made of small ripples and details that just barely crack its calm surface. “Blue Skies” returns to a crisp, deliberately retro coldwave, while “I Go Back” opens onto a denser, more surprising landscape: the voice emerges from a thicket of keyboards, percussion and reverb, subtle but insistent, forced to carve out space within an almost lush arrangement.

“Confession” is most convincing when Dal Forno submits to the discipline of the song form; far less so when she retreats into her own miniatures, or when repetition, as on “Gave You Up”, loses its hypnotic pull and stiffens into a wooden chant. It's a record to take in clusters, picking out the best fruit: not always cohesive, not always necessary, but capable, at its finest moments, of leaving behind a precise and lingering aftertaste.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

27/07/2026