Los Angeles – While she may dabble in theater and modeling, French “triple threat” SoKo has been most busy focusing her energy on a music career, and My Dreams Dictate My Reality has the promise and star-power to allow her to cross over to American audiences. 2012 saw her release a debut full-length, I Thought I Was An Alien, which was met with moderate success in Europe but got very little attention in the United States. Out this week on her own Babycat Records, My Dreams Dictate My Reality is poised to break the singer, born Stéphanie Sokolinski, into the worldwide consciousness.
It seems as if the plan with My Dreams was to throw as many ideas and concepts at the wall as possible and see what sticks. The good news is that between the strong songwriting and the superb execution by Soko, the individual tracks are quite strong from cover to cover. The bad news is that the approach of jumping from sub-genre to sub-genre leads to a disjointed feel for the album, making it sound more like a singles collection than a unified concept.
Musically, My Dreams is all over the place; the album opens with laid back guitar-pop, has some moments such as “Who Wears The Pants” and “My Precious” that sound like some vintage 80’s-era Los Angeles new-wave, and the second track, “Ocean of Tears,” sounds like a re-worked version of Arcade Fire’s “Keep The Car Running.” The only unifying theme of this album is that all of the songs have a touch of 80’s influence, whether in the production and mixing, song structure or musical aesthetic.
SoKo looks and sings a lot like Sky Ferreira – she even makes a lot of the same fashion choices. Both women have husky, sensual voices that are able to add energy to the verses and hook in the listener during choruses. Both singers got their starts at a very young age, though SoKo began acting years before singing. Both are mining a genre of pop that is heavily indebted to the past. Despite this stark similarity to the critically acclaimed alternative-pop singer, SoKo really does not come across as some sort of “poor man’s” version of Ferreira. This is likely due to the fact that SoKo has been active as a singer for a few years longer than her younger peer, giving her ample time to develop her chops and create songs without focusing too much on what other artists are creating.
Another similarity between SoKo and Sky Ferreira is their collaborations with Ariel Pink. Pink has guest appearances on two tracks from My Dreams Dictate My Reality; the first is “Monster Love” and it is one of the strongest moments on the album. SoKo and Pink sing together in the verses and the gorgeous chorus, their voices complementing each other incredibly well. This dreamy pop song is a lot slower and more sublime than the tracks that come before it – SoKo drops her hard-edge attitude heard over the first seven songs and focuses on her emotional side. Ever the aspiring multi-talent, SoKo created a short film that fleshes out the song’s theme.
The second collaboration on the album is heard a couple songs later on “Lovetrap,” a track that is heavily influenced by earlier work of Pink. In fact, the song opens with “A Kinski assassin blew a hole in my chest,” knowingly aped from the opening line of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s classic album, Mature Themes. Though the song starts off as an homage, lyrically it starts to get pretty bizarre, touching on the themes of “Monster Love,” a song that is literally about monsters falling in love – this isn’t some sort of metaphor.
After that bizarre album-climax, My Dreams Dictate My Reality closes out with two final songs. Not necessarily afterthoughts, these are two well-crafted ballads with solid lyricism that revisit the sounds heard on the opening track. Ending the album with a whisper is a little surprising for an album that opened with such a strong taste for energy and the bizarre.
SoKo is busy making her way across Europe until March 26, when she comes back to the West Coast for a string of dates in California. Check her website for more information and tickets.
Matt Matasci
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