“Get yourself a proper job” is a parental or schoolmaster-generated mantra that many young musicians must have heard ad nauseam as they were trying to get going. Carlina de Place chose to ignore it.
Was she wise to do that? Time will tell but for now she’s more than holding her own in this brutal business.
Dropping out of school at 17 (I guess that means not going to ‘Uni’) ‘Selfish’ is only her third single release to date, and it’s on an independent label, Bon appétit.
Well she definitely serves up a tasty dish here.
She’s a bedroom pop artist, writing about her youthful experiences alone with her guitar or piano.
Bedroom pop sometimes means tinny or amateurish sounding but not on this occasion. Mind you, I don’t know where the strings ensemble went. Out on the landing, perhaps.
Delivered in a simple, matter of fact manner with no unnecessary embellishments, by way of keys and those strings (and they make their presence felt), ‘Selfish’ is a pop ballad with little hints of R&B and jazz; the latter noticeable in the phrasing.
She executes it effortlessly, across a wide vocal range, in an endearingly sultry fashion, and I can easily picture her performing the song in La Fontaine or the Copenhagen Jazzhouse. (Just a little name dropping there, to show how cool I am).
‘Selfish’ deals with that subject precisely – how holding on to a failing relationship might be dictated by those feelings when it might be better for all concerned to draw a line under it.
The only criticism I would make is that when she’s being sultry the standard of diction falls a little. The final “selfish” utterances sound more like sudfish.
Otherwise, as I said earlier the recording and production standards are very high and it helps when you have a Grammy-award winning producer working for you (Morten ‘Rissi’ Ristorp, who has worked with the likes of Lukas Graham, Julia Michaels, Kanye West and Beyoncé.
Find her on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carlinadeplace
Photo: Cathrine Brix.
