"I don't want my voice to be heard," experimental pop enchantress Maria Minerva sings early on her second full-length album, Will Happiness Find Me?. The irony here is that this is perhaps the first Minerva record where you can understand everything she's singing. Her aesthetic is aqueous, intimate, and intentionally murky; her songs sound like an after-after-hours DJ set at a disco that happens to be inside a seldom-cleaned aquarium. Unlike the intimate, rough-hewn Cabaret Cixous, which she put together in her bedroom, Happiness was recorded in a proper studio, but that doesn't mean Minerva's suddenly courting a larger audience. That line quoted above? It's from a song called "I Don't Wanna Be Discovered", and with its enchanting, kaleidoscopic loops; thumping, muffled beat (which sounds like something overheard through a neighbor's wall); and cheeky sloganeering ("How do you explain to people that you don't really care?"), it's probably the closest she's come yet to writing her own theme song.
Minerva's a laptop vagrant, and her music knowingly cultivates a world where ongoing Pro Tools projects and familiar keystrokes (there was a song on Cabaret Cixous called "I Luv Ctrl") give off the most consistent sense of home. On a break from working on her thesis at London's Goldsmiths University, Estonian-born Minerva (real name: Maria Juur) recorded Happiness while she was living temporarily in Lisbon. But as self-consciously digital-minded as her music is, she isn't so much interested in replicating the antic maximalism of the world around her as she is in trying to create deep grooves that provide escape and transcendence. It works, sometimes: Though Cabaret Cixous wasn't a particularly inviting record, Minerva hit a sweet spot last year with her entrancing Sacred & Profane Love EP. Her prolificacy also seems intricately connected to her digital-friendly aesthetic (she's been making music for only two years but has already put out half a dozen releases on L.A.-based imprints 100% Silk and Not Not Fun), though it occasionally works to her disadvantage. All but her very best songs feel somewhat half-baked, ideas that could have amounted to more were they given a little more time to develop.
Minerva's music remains an acquired taste, and Will Happiness Find Me? is not a record to convert people who've been put off by her stuff in the past. Still, it's noticeably clearer in its vision than anything she's put out before. "The Sound" and "I Don't Wanna Be Discovered" are both immersive, evocative, and confident, and closing track "The Star" marks maybe Minerva's most interesting use of sampling yet, as she exhales a countermelody atop a looping, vaguely eerie piece of the Chordettes' "Mr. Sandman". The track's faded glamor complements her aesthetic well, though the same can't be said of Chase Royal's stilted verse on the misstep "Fire". On a record that's otherwise so intimate and personal, his voice feels like an awkward intrusion.
There is, of course, a conscious and built-in awkwardness to Minerva's music, and as the DIY-or-die anthem "I Don't Wanna Be Discovered" attests, she intends this to be one of its charms. Still, with each subsequent release something about this approach becomes a little more frustrating. The best song on Cixous was "Ruff Trade", which communicated the same themes-- desire, control, and the temptation of "selling out"-- as the rest of the record, but the straightforward hook gave it a certain immediacy that her music usually shies away from. Keeping her project this intimate has its virtues, for sure, but how much better might Minerva be, you can't help but wonder, if she were actually trying to be discovered?
