Album Review: Portrait Of My Heart by Spellling

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.

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Portrait of My Heart's opening, titular track is a symphonic lament soaked in the spindly shadow of late 70s goth rock, on which Chrystia Cabral expresses a purgatorial absence of belonging. The following tracks, Keep It Alive and Alibi, take from the seemingly discordant worlds of 80s hair metal/dad rock and Y2K Disney Channel pop-punk, combining them in a way that prods you between the eyebrows and demands you listen closely. Then there are songs like Ammunition - an opera-rock ballad complete with searing, baroque guitar lines - which blow your preconceptions of this historically oblique and witchy artist completely out of the water.

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Despite all the talk around how we live in a musical age defined by multi-faced genre smashing, the new sonic fusions arising in the internet-driven, everything-everywhere-all-the-time era are essentially never anointed names. The idea that a name like 'punk', which arose from decades of gradual socio-linguistic mutations, could ever be given to a genre or subculture again seems downright alien in 2025. The protean discography of SPELLLING (a solo project headed by Chrystia Cabral) is resoundingly of this genre-less era, however, her latest full-length 'Portrait Of My Heart' is almost her most surprising for the simple fact that it's, well, a straightforward alt rock album.

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