EP Review: otta - 'songbook'
Finnish-British singer otta shares ‘songbook’; a dreamy, wistful journey into the unknown treasures of memory and nostalgia.
otta is no stranger to using wistful and daring themes as a conduit for nostalgia. Her appeal lies in the way that her songs feel like ever-evolving fragments of thought, woven together with melancholic melodies and unsettling-yet-endearing aloof musical arrangements.
Her new EP songbook is as beautiful as you’d expect - her musical palette is difficult to pinpoint in a way that evades assignment to one specific idea or genre, yet rich in its ability to dazzle and appeal to the inner darkness within us. But this isn’t a darkness in the traditional sense; there is a certain ominous feel to the songs yet they allude to something simultaneously explosive in colour.
‘Sick inside’, the second single taken from the EP, is lusciously fervent in its skewed melancholy achieved by otta’s haunting, echoey vocals and pensive lyricism: “When did I get so tired?”. The song was inspired by otta’s experience with working in the music industry, she says; “I was 19, and from where I was standing it was largely a white, male-dominated toxic environment, that's what the lyrics are about.”
otta collaborated with kwes (Kano, Tirzah, Solange) for songbook, with freeform and creativity being huge driving forces; “I wanted to make my own [songbook], but with the reality of what that would sound like for me. I knew from the way my music had been sounding that the completed songs would feel the opposite to the feeling I got from the word,” she says, “I found it fun to visualize characters in each and make alternative narratives that definitely influenced my production and visual choices.”
Words by Kelly Scanlon