‘Svart’ means Black in Swedish and there’s enough darkness in here, the debut single from Stockholm raised and based Lovisa (von) Szalay to last you until the next Nordic Noir drama arrives on your TV screen.
It’s Film Noir that is the object of Lovisa’s attentions, the style of critique applied by predominantly French critics to the films directed by American thriller films made in the post-war years, and especially to those of Orson Wells and Fritz Lang
Last year she started working with the Swedish-Iranian singer, songwriter and producer Hessam, who has experienced various aspects of Swedish society and surely knows which way the wind blows around the capital.
Lovisa and Hassem’s objective was to place the music in a world that invites the listener to a French Film Noir; one that is dream like, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. Ooh là là!
‘Svart’ is about a destructive relationship to partying and the desire to leave that life behind, but you find you always tend to get pulled back into the maelstrom, the social whirl as so acutely described by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Ergo, it’s quite a sultry, sexy song. How could anything dealing with this presentation of French culture be any different?
Unfortunately I don’t have access to the lyrics so I can only relate the feelings it invokes.
It isn’t yé-yé (she does distinctly have the look of a yé-yé girl); it is much darker than that and it isn’t difficult to imagine it as the musical backdrop to a film scene in which Brigitte Bardot and France Gall are being pursued along the Boulevard de Clichy by Serge Gainsbourg and Alain Delon, each of them hidden in a cloud of Gitanes smoke.
Yes it is that French, the orchestral production over jangly piano is just so and her exceptional voice could have been made precisely for this song.
I can’t imagine how it cannot turn up soon in a film drama or television advert. It ticks all the boxes.
If this is the debut single, pour Lovisa l’avenir est sans frontiers.
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lovisa.vonszalay (private account)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lovisavszalay/
Find Hessam on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hessamofficial
