Weekend Intermission is our regular feature where we look at an artist or band not from the Nordic countries, just to mix things up a bit.
In advance of her debut and eponymous album which is set for release on 14th March, Toria Wooff teases viewers with the video to ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’, which has already been released as a single.
A UK northerner and a student of music at Salford University if I read it correctly – and we’ve had a few of those in the last year or so – she’s already well known around the Northern Circuit with several years’ experience under her belt and has completed a few shows in London.
I was intrigued to read she has synaesthesia; not a disease but an ability to experience one of your senses through another, so that hearing her own name might make her see blue, or seeing the words ‘folk music’ could make her taste a jam butty.
I’m reminded that Anna Calvi has the same attribute, at least where colours are concerned, which is why the colour red figures so highly in her stage attire and ultra red lipstick and it encouraged me to tune into Toria.
Toria’s acknowledged as a painter (which incidentally she is, literally, as well as being a poet) of gothic-tinged folk music. I’m not going to argue with that as I don’t know enough about what she’s been doing over these last few years.
But musically at least this song seems to me to be oriented more towards Americana than anything Goth and I couldn’t help but think that if it somehow managed to catch the airwaves down Tennessee way a few phone calls might well be made to Bolton to find out more.
I would suggest that SXSW should be calling, at the least.
The Gothic element is perhaps better found in the lyricism as the song digs deep into how friendship fares over time, or doesn’t as the case may be.
I don’t know if she did her own arrangement and production but there’s a previous era feel to it – perhaps the 1970s – which is heightened by the magical combination of a Hammond organ (I haven’t heard or seen one of those since Emerson used to stick knives in his and sexually molest it) and pedal steel guitar.
You’d be hard pressed to hear this sort of sound anywhere else at the moment. Lap it up.
Toria has two live dates in May:
23rd May: Manchester, Yes Basement
25th May: London, Green Note
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/toriarosewooff
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/toriawooff/
