Spellling gets impassioned on Portrait of My Heart

If we must force Chrystia Cabral to wring out forested whimsy and interdimensional portals out of every instrument, genre, and influence she has, at least we’ll get another year or two as a species in the process. I am of the more jaded folk who posit that, strictly speaking, music is not inherently worth living for – but her’s certainly is.

Frame Spellling’s artistry like this: Stevie Wonder’s attention to fine detail and soundcraft, Kate Bush’s full-body, orchestral cloud of lush, and a Greek goddess of forest animals so fragile that intense-enough stares may do them in. Each record in her catalogue has so dutifully honed her craft and ambition that Portrait of My Heart arrives not as a next project for adoring fans, but as the next tablet rained down from the mountaintop. Cabral has always had the auteurist vision those above greats possessed, growing into an audiophile’s dream artist across synth-pop and art-rock master-displays.

Front and center on this newest record is her inclusion of distorted guitars and traditional pop-rock structures, pulled from somewhere between Stuck in the Suburbs and Dream Theater. At its unmistakable center, however, is Cabral’s natural wonder at the prospect of being alive; uplifting in the post-COVID haze of 2021’s The Turning Wheel, but more kitschy to the bitter outlooks of today. Perhaps that’s why the winds of inspiration threw Cabral and company to the direct camp of turn-of-the-century Kelly Clarksonisms. Make it so sweet that the black licorice, dark roast coffee, lemon juiced salt wound of our lives can even stomach the medicine.

There’s wisdom to be mined from if it’s double the darkness, then double the radiance on a genre front; Western society has plunged itself into the throes of anti-intellectualism, so stamp out the prog and turn up the guitars, Cabral posits. Okay, we can keep a little prog. No matter the context or instrumental makeup of a song, Cabral refuses to let an inexplicably odd moment go by without adding a whimsical synth line. If she’s afraid of the synths catching dust on the shelves, it makes me wonder if the time it takes to grow the dust is in between every song. And as she’s grown a reputation for crafting her songs, a few of the distorted guitar tones (which cake the record) feel more like presets than intentional craft; there’s at least one guitar I’m sure needs a tightening around the bridge pickup.

What lets the record dive into her usual realm of staggering emotional depth is, again, her emotive core relentlessly shooting out UV rays of hesitant optimism. Even in her uncertainty, where the first chorus of the album is simply “I don’t belong here,” and the record hits a car crash of a mid-album lull, her confidence in tomorrow even happening is unignorable.

There’s a brazen belief in self necessary to even attempt the music she bats at, much less the album’s closer, a cover of the classic My Bloody Valentine ballad “Sometimes.” If I was them, a cease and desist would’ve been mailed the second the thought occurred in Cabral’s head. It’s a fantastical and cathartic rendition that gives not only the original a run for its £250,000, but also drives home the point. Whether it be a new genre, or an old song, Cabral owns the world she makes for herself. Like her or not, every time she sings a song, it’s for the first time.