Lonely Drifter Karen

by Mike Haydock

Never mind InterRailing across Europe - your ticket's right here

"There are times when the ebb and flow of the music sound like Beirut or Norwegian singer Hanne Hukkelberg - Lonely Drifter Karen capture the same sense of space, eccentricity and artistic freedom."

You wouldn’t call people who go on gap years particularly adventurous. But packing your bags at the age of 20 and leaving your hometown for an entirely different country - now that takes some courage. So goes the tale of Tanja Frinta, now 28, who left Vienna and her all-girl indie band to move to Sweden eight years ago.

But it was when she moved to Barcelona that she hooked up with her current Lonely Drifter Karen bandmates: pianist Marc Melia Sobrevias (also an expert arranger) and drummer Giorgio Menossi, who hail from Spain and Italy respectively. It’s little wonder, then, that the band’s debut album, ‘Grass Is Singing’, is a whimsical European love affair, influenced by the sounds of the continent. There are elements of cabaret, gypsy folk, jazz and classical music - the final dabs of ‘Salvation’, for example, sound like they’ve been lifted from a piece by Tchaikovsky. ‘Grass Is Singing’ is a Russian doll of delights, shot through with a warm Mediterranean breeze.

Frinta is as adventurous as her story would suggest, refusing to stick to boring modern templates, and instead picking out delicate segments of melody and stitching them together in a kind of off-the-cuff manner, as though she’s making it up on the spot. A cat meows on ‘True Desire’; a typewriter introduces 'Climb'; crowd noise swamps the middle of ‘Casablanca’, carrying us to the Moroccan port in the heat of the day, before night falls and an owl hoots.

There are times when the ebb and flow of the music sound like Beirut or Norwegian singer Hanne Hukkelberg - Lonely Drifter Karen capture the same sense of space, eccentricity and artistic freedom. And it’s truly compelling to listen to, each song different from the one it follows, and each song wriggling with creativity.

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