Princess Diana of Wales: s/t LP

Princess Diana of Wales, by London-based Australian Laila Sakini, is A Colourful Storm's latest and most curious project. Someone, no one, a notion, a feeling... Sakini offers clues but no simple answers. Vocal-led pieces "Still Beach" and "Fragments of Blue" are brittle and intoxicating, contemplating recklessness and unfulfillment of a past life: "Watching the future wash away/ Giving it up to have this day". She studies closeness and, incredulous of the feelings that emerge, wonders if detachment is impermanent. She catalogs these emotions as a series of memories, colors, and images. "Evaporate", sedated and hushed, is a secret confession and ode to resolution, albeit, fatally, only a temporary one: "Take some form/ Later on when I can do this/ When we can do this/ Together". Behind the album is a stage of dubwise disorientations evoking in-between states of the everyday. "Swing" and "Closer" are woozy and dreamlike, their voices summoning ghosts of fortunes past while "Exhaust" finds an aperture in our protagonist's daydream. A perilous foreshadowing of the incantatory "Choir Chant", whose spell pacifies her inquisition, submerging both self and feeling into the deep blue sea. RIYL: Grouper, Kali Malone, Drew McDowall. Full-color sleeve with insert.