Bella D
The Crystal Ceiling
Drumageddon Productions / DRMAGDN / Charlie Zeleny
2016
Props to Bella D, who turned her story of overcoming aggressive cancer into conceptual song and visual art... for being able to fend off that terrible disease that has claimed and keeps claiming a lot of people around the world, young and old alike.
Now as an artist Bella D has a big, produced sort of symphonic sound that mixes rock and some electronic orchestrations into a style that she rounds off with some steam-punk inspired visual/aesthetics.
While she certainly has a lot of good ideas and melodies, there’s something in the overall mix and sound that doesn’t allow the material to breathe… at any given moment there’s something going on and the voice doesn’t quite cut through the mix as much as it should. There’s some repetition and Bella despite proving to have quite a voice seems a little hesitant to really go for it instead opting for a more produced approach which deprives the performances of the passion they might have had. Also sometimes the vocal style seems a little confused, sometimes just plainly pop and then sometimes pseudo-classical, in a way that fragments the overall flow of the album.
Surely songs like “End of the World”, “Save Me”, “The Crystal Ceiling” and “Invincible” are pretty interesting and the oddball-classical inspired “Dio Solitario Della Notte” do standout, but despite using more than a dozen of semi-famous session players, the end-result doesn’t manage to overcome the sum of its parts.
Now as an artist Bella D has a big, produced sort of symphonic sound that mixes rock and some electronic orchestrations into a style that she rounds off with some steam-punk inspired visual/aesthetics.
While she certainly has a lot of good ideas and melodies, there’s something in the overall mix and sound that doesn’t allow the material to breathe… at any given moment there’s something going on and the voice doesn’t quite cut through the mix as much as it should. There’s some repetition and Bella despite proving to have quite a voice seems a little hesitant to really go for it instead opting for a more produced approach which deprives the performances of the passion they might have had. Also sometimes the vocal style seems a little confused, sometimes just plainly pop and then sometimes pseudo-classical, in a way that fragments the overall flow of the album.
Surely songs like “End of the World”, “Save Me”, “The Crystal Ceiling” and “Invincible” are pretty interesting and the oddball-classical inspired “Dio Solitario Della Notte” do standout, but despite using more than a dozen of semi-famous session players, the end-result doesn’t manage to overcome the sum of its parts.