As is unlikely to have gone unnoticed by anyone who’s read more than say…two of my past reviews, my favourite band of all time is Alcest, and has been for a very long time now. One of many reasons they’ve been hitting my musical sweet spot for the best part of twenty years now (which makes me feel a little like a fossil), is because frankly, sometimes you just want to close your eyes and disappear into another world for a bit. Alcest’s original schtick was to recreate (and make accessible) another dimension that our shy, wistful romancer in chief Neige has been encountering for just about as long as he can remember. Just don’t call it “Fairyland”, because he doesn’t like that. (There are some wonderfully strident past interviews on that last point if you want to go looking for them.)
At the risk of stating the painfully bloody obvious, Alcest are far from the only band to seek to send the listener into another world/dimension with their music, not to mention the many, many others who achieve it without even deliberately setting out to do so. Escapism is a core tenet of music of all flavours, after all. And technically Alcest are post of varying sorts, while Cécile Delpoïo is “fantasy darkwave/ethereal folk”, so there shouldn’t be that much crossover – and musically there isn’t a great deal beyond the overall ethereal, otherworldly vibe. The underlying mission statements in play though are notable in their similarities, from being the creation of a single multitalented human, right down to the lyrics in a created language that’s meant to be from the place explored in the music.
Cécile Delpoïo takes this further than Neige ever did though, with a level of world-building that is generally pretty rare outside of high fantasy novels. There’s a protagonist – Aodrëna – a named world – Tuolla – and a storyline that the album tells in its entirety. Where Neige hands you the key to the Other Place, but otherwise takes a very hands-off approach to how the listener encounters it, stepping into Tuolla (in the sense of both experiencing the album and wandering off into the world itself) is more like walking into a movie in full swing. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing, but more on that later. You might well prefer one approach over the other (I do), but even if you’d rather explore such places at your own pace, the complexity of Tuolla makes it an experience worth having regardless.
Looking at the woman behind all of this, the titular Cécile Delpoïo, the movie analogy starts to make even more sense than it did when I first wrote it down. The accompanying materials describe her as “an artist with several hats”, which is both a lovely little quirk of the translation process (I assume the original French was more along the lines of “wears many hats in the course of her work”), and fairly accurate as far as I can tell. She’s clearly an accomplished musician and vocalist, but also does video production (for her own works and those of others), and also appears to have done all the illustration attached to this album as well. Several hats indeed.
On top of her familiarity with video production, one of Delpoïo’s main musical influences is Hans Zimmer, he of The Lion King, Gladiator and many others, which accounts for how much of this album feels like a film score. This doesn’t always work in the album’s favour, because there are passages throughout that feel so much like the score to an epic fantasy film that it – possibly slightly inevitably – feels like there’s something missing from the experience. Don’t get me wrong, it takes skill to write music that sounds this much like there should be a film playing while it’s on, but if you’ve ever tried to listen to film score music out of context, you’ll know that it’s a slightly odd experience, and a fair but of Tuolla has similar issues. Highest Dreams for instance, is very pretty, but there’s a level of progression and musical phrasing in it that sounds like it should be soundtracking actual visuals, not listened to on its own.
At its strongest, Tuolla leans into delicate, evocative folk that sounds not unlike a cross between Karl Jenkins’ Adiemus, Tchaikovsky’s Sugar Plum Fairy (there’s either an actual celestina on this album, or something that really sounds like one) and the rich, sprawling score to a slightly breathless fantasy epic. There’s also significant influence from the earlier end of orchestral music, which is hardly surprising given that Delpoïo’s most recent release (Tuolla was released last year) is a “gothic electro dubstep symphonic” rendition of Henry Purcell’s Dido’s Lament (When I am Laid in Earth), which if nothing else shows off just how good her voice really is. The combination of strong vocals and this folky/orchestral scene-setting is far and away the best thing about huge swathes of this album.
Elsewhere, there are valiant attempts at a more experimental take on things, that appear to be “soundtracking” the more dramatic parts of the story, and this is where the weaker aspects of Tuolla can be found. Erimaïlma is gorgeous in places, but there are others where Delpoïo’s voice – excellent as it is – can’t quite do what she’s asking it to, including passages that sound like the sort of Ukrainian folk chant singing that is probably best known by way of Mykola Shchedryk’s Carol of the Bells. The same motif pops up in a few other places and usually works better (the exception being a passage in The Serpent’s Venom), but quite a bit of Erimaïlma needed reining in of some description, if only to make the whole more coherent. This is also the point of Tuolla that feels most like playing film music out of context – there’s clearly a lot going on in its 10.11 min. length, but even with a copy of the lyrics (in English), I couldn’t really tell you much of what’s happening beyond the basic storyline.
Beyond Erimaïlma, there’s more of what makes the first half work, with some borderline prog lurking in The Castle. It’s slightly incongruous, but not unpleasant to listen to, much like the soaring vocals at the end, that sound like they should be playing under some epic love scene (more specifically, the montage where our star-crossed lovers finally get to go and spend quality time alone together). The rest of the second half is fairly unremarkable until Flying rounds things off in a similar vein to the tracks at the very beginning.
So basically, when Tuolla works, it works well. It’s nothing particularly ground-breaking (apart from the sheer number of hats worn by its creator), but it’s an enjoyable meander through the folky, orchestral, thoroughly cinematic world of Cécile Delpoïo. The story and world-building aspects are nice enough, but frankly the album doesn’t really tell it in any meaningful way for the most part. Yes, you can read the translated English lyrics (the actual lyrics are in Delpoïo’s language from the land of Tuolla), but without being able to follow the actual words, the music is essentially setting you up for a story that isn’t really there in any real way. The music and the story are both well done, they just don’t combine here in the way that was intended – parts of the album have specific enough phrasing that I suspect Delpoïo has/had entire scenes and narratives in mind when making this album, which only adds to the persistent feeling that you’re listening to one part of a greater whole.
All of that said, if you can put the storybook aspect of Tuolla aside, the musicianship here is very good, and Delpoïo is clearly an accomplished artist on multiple fronts. When this album works, the end result is beautiful, and its worth listening to at least once just for that.
(6.5/10 Ellie)
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