Modern Australian rock icon and Magic Dirt frontwoman ADALITA finally delivers her carefully crafted and remarkably intimate debut solo album. The press release articulates this sparse skin crawler to best effect - “the music isn’t so much a radical departure from Magic Dirt as it is a distillation of everything that band represents, with the layers of instrumentation stripped away, leaving only the bare bones of the songs themselves.” Driven by Adalita’s beautiful vocal melodies (that are sometimes fierce and tense), the bed of her minimal compositions are haunting guitarscapes reminiscent of Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack. Exploring overdubs and ghostly textures, the recordings are weightless and maintain the raw and spontaneous plug-in-and-play approach of her live performances. As Adalita rotates between guitar, percussion, piano and drums, the album is largely a one woman show performance wise, yet it’s impossible to look past the impact of the late Dean Turner, her mentor and the album’s co-producer. Dean’s encouragement was the catalyst of this solo project and his incredible understanding of production techniques explains how these powerful sonics sit so perfectly (just put on your headphones!). The album also recruits guest musicians Raúl Sanchez (guitar on ‘Lassa Hanta’), Amaya Laucirica (backing vocals on ‘Good Girl’) and multi-instrumentalist wonder JP Shilo (Hungry Ghosts, Rowland S Howard). While Adalita sounds as honest and unique as nothing prior, loose reference points include Patti Smith, PJ Harvey and Cat Power. An infinitely rewarding listen.

(words by Michael Kucyk)