Felicità - hej! (2018)

‘hej!’ is the hauntingly hyperreal first album proper by Felicita, for PC Music.

Arriving 5 years since Felicita’s beguiling ‘(>’.’)>#’ and ‘Frenemies’ releases took us by surprise with their lacquered textures and uncannily poignant arrangements, ‘hej!’ claims their place in the same dimensions as Arca, Sophie and 0PN with a highly personalised expression of hyperreal modernity.

Polish folk, trance, trap and and classical chamber music are melded into the same mutant body of music with deceptively effortless appeal that’s both pop-wise and avant, charming and at times unsettling thru its juxtapositions of new and old.

Warbling keys haunt much of the album, but in a way that swerves the poshness of, say Nils Frahm and co, for a more surreal and unreal effect, especially when he adds in snatches of processed Polish folk song, and then sharply switches to needling electronics, as with the vacuum sealed hyper reggaeton of ‘coughing up amber’, while the melodic couplet of ‘soft power I + II’ feel paradoxically timeless yet right in the pregnant here-and-now, though their pastoral field recordings came from a computer game, rather than the real thing.

The salty blatz of ’shook’ is a tart palate cleanser at the centre of the album, bristling with an outright aggression that contrast the rest of the set, particularly the eerie highlight of Caroline Polachek’s take on ‘marzipan’, an old Polish folk song reinterpreted with lustrous Reese-like bass and synthetic strings, while the sickening rush of ‘night soil (fade out)’ recalls the devil in the detail noise of Croww, and the closing ‘Mosaic’ elicits a most curious synthesis of emotions - ecstasy, fear, and romance in it’s fleeting choral cadence.