Yes, ‘Conatus‘. Not a pharmaceuticals company or species of river-bottom fish, but an idea. A spark. The spark, actually. The word ‘conatus’ is a lot of things to a lot of philosophers, but the closest approximation to a definition would be “the will to live”, or “the movement of the soul”. So, not an album about sunshine and smiles and skipping for miles.
Nika Roza Danilova is Zola Jesus, continuing the noble musical tradition of adding two established names together to make a new one, much like Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga and er, Captain Beefheart. Shush. Of course he counts. Mercifully, unlike the first two of those examples, Danilova seems solely focused on making brave, exciting music, rather than building up a cult image.
So what we really have here is something quite consciously and convincingly avant garde; not so much in the gaudy, pretentious vein of Lady Gaga, more in the sense of sharp, frightening projections of the future. You can spot the odd idea moving on parallel lines to things that have gone before; ‘Ixode‘ conjures up the darker passages of Peter Gabriel’s OVO millennium project; the oddly Celtic vibe of ‘In Your Nature‘ always seems on the verge of bursting into the theme from Sharpe or a belting chorus of ‘In A Big Country‘.
That said, these musical comparisons are fleeting, almost irrelevant. It feels like ‘Conatus’ has much deeper roots in Danilova’s love of literature and philosophy. Her voice more than anything lends tracks like ‘Vessel‘ and ‘Hikikomori‘ (Japanese for extreme and deliberate isolation) an unearthly quality, as if it were bleeding through hidden walls in old houses. For all her eerie, tempestous tones, she might be Cathy’s ghost clawing at the windows of Wuthering Heights, or Jane Eyre’s mad woman in the attic, wandering the halls of Thornfield in the dead of night.
What might be going on in these songs is the beauty of ‘Conatus’. Danilova leaves plenty of room for the imagination to stretch and leap in her restless, roaming songs. Her arrangements are defined almost exclusively by space, by the silence between crashing keys and crisp, skeletal synthesisers. Even the less accomplished tracks like ‘Seekir‘ or ‘Lick The Palm Of The Burning Handshake‘ find a way to grow on you. The latter’s odd string arrangements, for instance, strike you first as bagpipes in the distance. Then you realise, this far into the album, that such an idea doesn’t seem nearly so surprising as it might have before you heard the ghostly squalls of ‘Avalanche‘, or the deathly still charm of ‘Ixode’.
‘Conatus’ won’t be for everyone. It just won’t. And that’s fine. This kind of album isn’t for jukeboxes and TV montages; it’s music for people who purposely find 40 minutes in the day and listen to an album all the way through, just for the sake of hearing it. Never mind that the track listing reads like a Haiku anthology. This music doesn’t need a woman cartwheeling around with a glittered-up toilet seat on her head to validate its avant garde credentials.
These songs are charged with a strange, urgent vitality; even in the dying minutes of ‘Collapse‘, Danilova sings “it hurts to let you live”, sounding as if she’s wrenching out her heart a little more with every syllable. ‘Conatus’ is strong enough and deep enough to stand up on its own two jewel-case-shaped feet.
It’s every inch worth your time, your intelligence and your attention.
(Simon Moore)
