If So She Howls, Carla Patullo‘s Grammy-winning previous album chronicled and explored themes around the artist’s own battle with cancer, Nomadica ventures even further into complex emotional issues such as grief, fear, and feelings borne of staring into the inevitable void of death. But for all its complex subject matter, dwelling on those all too often unspoken challenges we all face, it is also an album full of beauty, the sound of melancholy turned into melody, grief into grace, heartache into breathtaking harmony.
Born of thoughts of an imagined encounter with her late mother, who tragically had died suddenly in a car accident, what might easily have become a descent, a mourning, a brooding, becomes the opposite, a glorious ascent as Patullo weaves optimism and hope, a sense of acceptance and enlightenment through the music via healing frequencies and uplifting, rousing and ethereal sonics.
And if the title track is perfect for setting the tone of the album, a serene soundscape woven from stirring yet seductive strings and ambient drifts, “A Handblown World,” which follows, takes such musicality to anthemic realms, sounding like a bridge between ancient choral music and futuristic, almost Vangelisian soundtracks.
“Undercurrent” works its magic in subtler ways, closer to perhaps Enya than the anthemic, but no less gorgeous, a swirl of sound washes and voice as instrument, choirs of angels gracing the earthbound, if you will excuse the hyperbole.
I could wax lyrical about the awards that have followed in the wake of Carla Patulla’s music, her positions as music director to the great and good, her numerous film scores, and everything in between. But I would suggest that you just let the music speak for her, and speak it does, but in a language that is less about the head and more about the heart and even the soul itself.
