★★★½
It would seem wasteful if Norwegian singer-songwriter Aurora created anything less than the fairy-tale-tinted indie-pop ofAll My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend.
After all, the 19-year-old shares a name with the princess from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and hails from a town (no joke) whose name translates to ‘Fjord of Lights’. Yet this debut offers the fantastical with fangs.
Against a dreamy and disquieting landscape, we meet a cast of unlikely heroes. There’s the restless runaway who seeks abandonment in nature, a warrior whose greatest enemy is herself, a victim who empathises with her murderer. These 12 tracks explore monsters of an intimate kind; dashed hopes, gnawing loneliness and engulfing insecurities. ‘Running With The Wolves’ and ‘Warrior’ conjure chase scenes with their primal drums, prickly synths and war cry vocals, while ballads ‘Through The Eyes Of A Child’ and ‘Home’ entrance with ethereal harmonies and feathery keys. Every track swells to the same cathartic crescendo; Aurora’s vocals driving with the grace and gall of a sailboat at sea.
An evocative mixture of visceral beats, supple vocals and earworm melodies, All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend is a pithy and playful romp in the big bad woods.
