Berlin-based songwriter Sabrina Milena sounds natural lodged deep inside a grim dirge. "Thirsty", the third song on her full-length debut, is the record's quintessential track, the guitar and banjo sounding like they're walking uphill on a dirt road and collapsing every other step from exhaustion. And Milena's deep voice, reminiscent of Jessie Sykes' nicotine-stained croon but with more quivering vibrato, staggers a couple steps ahead, bound for someplace dark and probably a little scary.
The bedroom production on Seven Sisters is full, the electronics and samples combining with acoustic instruments and odd synths in that way that artists on Monika and Tomlab always seem adept, but the real draw is Milena's voice. She often doubles or triples it, almost as often adds a bit of processing to make it sound a hair less human, but these tweaks and layers exist mostly reinforce that she sounds very alone. This is a hermetic record, very much one person carefully making tracks alone in her apartment, even when guests chip in. Tord Lövik from the Riverendings duets on the gorgeous "Love Feel You Do", and with the slightly out-of-tune acoustic guitar zeroing in on a couple notes and the rolled-off high end it almost sounds like Jandek and Nancy covering some Townes Van Sant tune. It's romantic longing at its saddest and most fatalistic.
While its solitary nature certainly works to Seven Sisters' advantage, sometimes it feels a bit too claustrophobic, hemmed-in to the point of queasiness. There's an odd cast to the production here, certain woozy samples of strings that seem about 4-bits deep and that stretch and contract at irregular intervals. Somewhere lurking inside "Figs Tree" is a straightforward murder ballad but the production is impossible to get a fix on, like a melodramatic film sound track recovered from a degraded print left to rot in the studio's basement. "How Ode" is even more warped, its backward music box and wildly distorted vocals that seem to waft out of one of some postmodern deconstruction of a Kurt Weill operetta.
Milena has succeeded at constructing an odd and original gothic mood piece, but the headspace of Seven Sisters is the sort I'd only want to visit occasionally. "Lily Wyatt", a catchy acoustic pop song that stands out here like a starlight mint in a bowl full of razor blades, is the track here I keep returning to. That it works so well in a style outside the rest of the record suggests that Milena is an artist in control of her talent, ready to take it in different directions when so inclined.
