Album Review: Someone New by Helena Deland

Like a parcel of breakup roses compressed into a confetti cannon, Helena Deland's debut album is explosive, belaboured and totally intoxicating. After years of feather-flicking her audience with EPs and singles, the Montreal singer-songwriter has finally delivered the goods, with 13 painstakingly arranged songs of elegiac guitar pop, woven together like your comfiest quilt. Emotionally, Someone New is a saturnine affair; it's Nick Drake with synthesizers, or Natalie Prass with a pout, and while not every song on the album oozes Elliott Smith as much as the stripped-down album closer, "Fill the Rooms," Deland has picked up his torch of musical melancholy and sprinted away with it very far indeed — with a caravan of Polaris-truck-chasing PR men in her rose-petalled tow.

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In the artwork for Helena Deland's debut album 'Someone New', a Vermeer-esque portrait painted by Xavier Beldor, the viewer is looking at Deland, who in turn is looking away, clearly aware of being watched, but occupied by other thoughts. It's the perfect image for a record which finds its theme in the gaze. What it means to see yourself through the eyes of others, and what happens when they stop looking.

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Helena Deland writes songs about love from the vantage point of a dream state. The Montreal-based songwriter's music channels feelings of derealization and disconnect: those moments when your body no longer feels like your own, or your words seem to hang like language suspended, illuminated in midair. Deland writes in fragments: On her last release, a strange series of EPs later packaged as an album titled From the Series of Songs "Altogether Unaccompanied", she told cryptic and poetic stories tinged by psychedelic drugs and loneliness and longing.

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