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Music Boom review of stephanie dosen's One enters the world of Stephanie Dosen with a little trepidation, because it's personal and feminine, filled with cats, lace and emotions and secrets with friends in nightgowns. One is a little afraid, as I said, but once faced with the presence of Ghosts... it is difficult to leave. If it is true that there are various ways to conquer an audience, Stephanie chooses the simple and sweet way: a handful of acoustic songs that conjure memories of American female singer/songwriters from Joni Mitchell to Suzanne Vega, sung with a simplicity that renders them light as air. The result is a familiar and spontaneous album that speaks the warm language or tradition and supported by magnificent writing, a quality too many artists forget about. We aren't used to an album of this sort of simplicity, with solid arrangements that don't abandon themselves to electronics and don't linger on enigmatic silences. Stephanie does this because this is the only way she knows: in Ghosts... there are no subterfuges; it is a voyage through emotion, offered with a smile. We aren't used to it and at the heart of it, we believe there's no reason for it, at least until a song like "Weak" doesn't hit us over the head, reminding us that one doesn't need any more than a voice and a guitar to evoke strong emotions. Here is what this disc is made of: in the first place, of emotions that flow purest from the acoustic chords and 11 small stories in music; of a charming, limpid and angelic voice that is able to vibrate, upholding the play of emotions; of songwriting essential and delicate, that creates songs that like the beauty of a rainbow, cannot be captured, and that suddenly become terse and hurting at the whim of the author: passing from the limpid percussion and keyboard structure of "Brave," to the naked intensity of "Song of the Maydoves" across a beautiful pearl of autobiography like "Northern Sky" and landing at two small masterpieces of melodic balance like "Weak" and "Blue Paper Lanterns." Meanwhile, Stephanie pays debts to Joni Mitchell in the elegant "Milkweed Sigh" and to Nick Drake in the harmonies of "Sea Mist and Mirrors." Ghosts, Mice and Vagabonds is one of those discs capable of making you rediscover your lost smile on Monday morning. It represents the most luminous essence of acoustic music, before artists like Jason Molina and Will Oldham stripped it of all its lights and dragged it down to the cellar. In the words of Stephanie, it is music of the non-coma-inducing sort, that shatters truths and redirects attention to the music. Don't search for it in shops, but rather among the virtual shelves of CD Baby ...satisfaction is guaranteed, even for us men. Review by Salvatore Patti, Musicboom.it , available here in full in Italian. With the author's permission, it has been translated by Bobby Tanzilo. |