There is a clarity in Abigail Lapell’s music, a clarity to match her crystalline, captivating voice. Lucid, translucent songs cast a gentle gaze towards the centre of time, and the centre of time casts a loving glance back before vanishing between notes. It’s like a Carole celebrating an otherworldly King-dom, one made of the collective memories, moments, darkness and optimism of those who travelled and sang along these trails before.
From the release of her first album in 2011, her melodicism led each song’s journey, with guitar and piano treading upon yesteryear’s fallen pine needles while harmonica, strings, pedal steel and other instruments occasionally peek out from the shadows. Lapell’s place in an Orthodox Jewish family that escaped Europe and the horror of the Holocaust, singing as a child in Yiddish and Hebrew, means her roots run deep. But growing up in French immersion in Montreal while worshipping Canadian indie heroes Lowest of the Low helps her juxtaposing branches stretch wide and solid.
Lapell’s music captures you in a mesmerising, otherworldly freshness as familiar as your favourite childhood memory. The more bare her songs, the fuller our hearts become as she draws on the past to make music as fresh as rain falling into snow, it’s like listening to time singing to itself.