ELLY KACE - The Seventh Gate

It's a thoroughly respectable résumé, that of young American soprano Elyse Anne Kakacek – Lauretta in "Gianni Schicchi", Norina in "Don Pasquale", Micaela in "Carmen", Gretel in "Hänsel e Gretel", Zerlina in "Don Giovanni" and Susanna in "Le nozze di Figaro" – a path that also led her through Italy, where the American artist spent time on an advanced opera-singing course, a stay that ended up lasting far longer than planned because of the pandemic. And it was precisely during that forced pause that the American artist worked out mental strategies to overcome the anxieties brought on by the halt to her artistic activity: the practice of yoga and a series of songs born purely for personal pleasure then opened up a new creative front, a further challenge for Elyse, who had already experienced the therapeutic power of music on an album pairing her voice with the sound of Tibetan singing bowls ("Satyam").

For Elyse Anne Kakacek, the song form thus represents the vulnerable soul of her musical identity, a trait nurtured by listening to Tori Amos, Cure, Fiona Apple, Björk, Cranberries, Sundays, Portishead and even the Clash, all while retaining harmonic and timbral influences firmly rooted in the classical-romantic tradition.

It's this intriguing blend of influences and passions that lies behind "The Seventh Gate", the new album by Elly Kace, the other side of the American artist, the one drawn to a baroque dream-pop, where a key element is a deep connection between music, singing and emotion, a bond lived out with all its attendant social and cultural implications.

The linearity and repetitiveness of pop music become malleable, unpredictable material in the hands and voice of Kelly Kace: it's hard, in fact, not to notice the sophisticated harmonic weave of a track like "Backwards In Blue", which leans much more toward a neoclassical scenario, and it's precisely this ability to turn, through the art of singing, a score for violin and cello into an ecstatic, shape-shifting dream-pop that gives "The Seventh Gate" its strength. The voice is once again the catalyzing element in "Even With The Light On", where Kelly Kace commands the different melodic and stylistic situations with impressive dynamism, but it's in the adventurous "The Body" that the qualities of the American singer-songwriter really come to the fore, with operatic flourishes running through a song of disorienting folk-pop textures drawing as much on Irish tradition as on Mediterranean sounds, for an atypical pop song that lines up Enya and Dolores O'Riordan.

"The Seventh Gate" is a concept album: what holds the ten tracks together are poetic reflections on lunar cycles and the significance of the zodiac signs, blending memories tied to childhood (the dream-folk of "Lisianthuses"), to the most intimate relationships (the romantic, gentle "What Would Be Enough"), to emotional rebirth after suffering (the trip-hop of "Dust") and to that spiritual mysticism which Elly Kace places at the heart of her forays into pop music (the lofty finale of "Pink Sky").

In a landscape increasingly crowded with folk and dream-pop voices, Elly Kace's album stands out as a welcome anomaly, thanks to a series of sophisticated, intricate compositions, to the interplay between opera, folk and electronics that yields more than one point of interest ("Syzygy", "Moon"), and to a spirituality that turns listening to "The Seventh Gate" into a multisensory experience.

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27/03/2026