Krista Detor – Chocolate Paper Suites
‘Chocolate Paper Suite’ is Krista’s fourth solo album, and over the past 5 years or so, with each new release and her involvement in the Darwin Song Project, her standing and profile has been deservedly on the rise. This new disc builds on all the work gone before and brings together her skills onto one beautifully conceived and constructed 15 track, 60 minute album.
The fifteen songs are broken up into five distinct suites of three songs each; the main body of the album is made up from four of the suites, with the final, bonus suite comprising of songs written for the Darwin project.
Breaking the album into smaller suites is the perfect way to get the listener to think about lyrics and thematic links between songs, whether that be Darwin, relationships, or even the magic and belief we project onto night sky; it’s all so much easier to understand the songs fully when they’re presented in this manner.
The album opens with the ‘Oranges Fall Like Rain’ suite, possibly the most stylistically varied of the five as it moves from the upbeat, electric guitar driven ‘Rich Man’s Life’, through to the Iberian air of ‘Lorca in Barcelona’, and the beautiful acoustic construction of ‘Recklessness and Rust’. Despite the differing paces and styles, the songs effortlessly segue into each other with real skill, and this is a construct that’s carried throughout the first 4 suites giving the songs a real sense of place and a relation to each other – if ever there was an album to listen to in sequence, this is it.
‘Night Light’ follows and the songs here are the three that set her voice centre stage and feature the smoothest, most limber vocals of the disc, as if in response to the loose, spare arrangements of these three songs; in particular ‘All to do with the Moon’ is an effortlessly beautiful waltz with a dreamy melody.
‘Madness of Love’ is the most congested and edgy of the suites, melodies and instrumentation take unexpected turns and the comforting air provided by ‘Night Light’ is quickly broken by ‘Innuendo’ and ‘Middle of a Breakdown’. The order of the album is restored by ‘Deliver Me’ which brings the pace down in preparation for the quietest suite, ‘By Any Other Name’. This fourth stanza is almost exclusively given up to Krista’s piano and Dave Weber’s guitar arrangements, and the final song of the suite ‘Small Things’ shows Krista’s controlled vocals at their very best.
The final suite ‘Darwin Songhouse’ brings together 3 songs that she wrote as a member of the Darwin Song Project in March 2009; ‘From Miss Emma Brawley’ and ‘Emma’s Lullaby’ were both re-recorded with members of the project, Mark Erelli provided guitar and vocals to the first track, and Chris Wood added achingly delicate violin to the latter. ‘Clock of the World’ was a real moment of magic from the project, and it’s presented here in the original recording with Karine Polwart, Emily Smith and Rachael McShane.
Going through the album for a review suite by suite is easy, but it misses the essence of Krista’s skill as a creative arranger, a deep thinker, and a master of imagery and poetic lyrics – this is an album that showcases all this and more. There’s so much for the listener to be involved with that it demands repeated listens, and those who spend time with the disc will be rewarded as it reveals its secrets.
