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STEREOGUM - Band to Watch: Doe Paoro
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Out this week is Slow To Love, the album by Brooklyn-based torch-song singer Doe Paoro. She comes wi...Out this week is Slow To Love, the album by Brooklyn-based torch-song singer Doe Paoro. She comes with some steam and production vision behind her already, which you can see in the crisp videos for “Born Whole” and “Can’t Leave You,” and via the strings that color the latter, or the session-player fretless-bass style that slices up Paoro’s R&B-by-way-of-Badu on “Born.” The record’s overall vibe is spacious verging on skeletal, though, suggesting a demo-like atmosphere which is actually somewhat becoming: Doe possess both a clean, capable voice, and the propensity to dip into Imogen Heap-y vocoder; she’s better when she’s more honest herself, and her instrument. Paoro has a pop song called “Body Games” ready for makeup commercials, a track called “I’ll Go Blind” that will sit well with those psyched about D’Angelo’s return, and a cover of a track by the great Baltimore synth-pop outfit Future Islands, and you can get at all of those — and the whole record — below
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STEREOGUM - 2012 In Review: The New Wave Of R&B Comes Into Full Bloom
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I was dumbfounded by the beauty and distinction of Doe Paoro‘s Erykah Badu-meets-Imogen Heap medita... I was dumbfounded by the beauty and distinction of Doe Paoro‘s Erykah Badu-meets-Imogen Heap meditation Slow To Love and comforted by Rhye’s subtle somnambulance. Solange, who has superstar credentials but really belongs with this bunch, teamed with Dev Hynes to produce this year’s most effortlessly effervescent EP. From the sounds of early singles by the likes of Autre Ne Veut, Dungeonesse and Toro Y Moi, next year is shaping up to be just as fruitful in this field.
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RCRD LBL - PREMIERE: Doe Paoro - Born Whole + Little Dreamer (Future Islands Cover)
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The blithe, the blessed, the unscarred: those are not welcome here. For the rest of you, meet the ha...The blithe, the blessed, the unscarred: those are not welcome here. For the rest of you, meet the haunting alley cat songstress that is Doe Paoro and her withering single “Born Whole.” With little more than her tarry vocals, a mild dubstep mist and the pounding of a few plaintive piano keys, she’ll scratch what’s left of your heart into ragged bits. Her atonal cover of Future Islands’ “Little Dreamer” is sparer still, and just as raw and emotive. Slow To Love is Ms. Paoro’s debut LP, and she’ll be unleashing it on those in need of a good cry on Valentine’s Day.
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THE VILLAGE VOICE - Download: Doe Paoro's Untethered, Spectral "Born Whole"
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Brooklyn singer-songwriter Doe Paoro is a wild mixture of contemporary sounds and ancient techniques...Brooklyn singer-songwriter Doe Paoro is a wild mixture of contemporary sounds and ancient techniques. Her single "Born Whole," taken from her debut Slow to Love (out last month), has the spectral fervor of Zola Jesus's haunted house swirl, Adele's retromaniacal bombast and ghostly traces of James Blake's post-dubstep—but Paoro's take on modern art-pop comes from an untethered vocal style she credits to her study of lhamo, the centuries-old Tibetan opera tradition. "Born Whole" starts as nimble, muted neo-soul but finds its magical energy through post-chorus flights of vocal fancy—think Winehouse-gone-Diamanda and you're close. Its unsettling video was shot with four close friends in her Syracuse hometown. Collaborator Miranda Siegel conceived its theme, as Paoro describes it, "of a fruitless quest and getting trapped in cycles of attachment and detachment," all influenced by their shared practice of vipassana meditation, the Buddhist tradition that seeks to understand the truths of reality.
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BEST NEW BANDS - Soft but Strong, Doe Paoro Can Really Hold a Room
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Doe Paoro is one of those performers that you may not realize how good they are until you see them l...Doe Paoro is one of those performers that you may not realize how good they are until you see them live. In the case of this Brooklyn-based chanteuse, her Bandcamp gives an idea of her vocal ability, but her live performance at Glasslands Wednesday night was jaw-dropping. Paired with live drums, the slight vibrato of analog organ, and the warm, organic texture of a cello, her voice rung out and echoed off the walls. She didn’t need any extra reverb or delay. She infuses her songs with deep soul and honest emotion, and her unassuming but strong stage presence conveyed that. She wasn’t just singing empty lyrics – I believed every word.
Paoro began with a room-silencing a capella, immediately showing off her range and showcasing techniques from studying Lhamo (Tibetan folk opera) in the Himalayas. It was a meditation, it was a mantra, it was a call to gather and listen. She then gently beckoned the crowd to move closer, softly saying “come, come.” Everyone immediately moved forward without hesitation, as if literally being moved by her musical force. She encouraged singing along as well, and even though many people seemed to already know the words, anyone who didn’t could catch on easily, as there is chant-like repetition of meaningful phrases that serve as solid reinforcement in Paoro’s songs. On “Born Whole” the crowd really lit up, especially when the beat dropped in the song – that was solid badassness, and there was no way to not feel awakened by the pumping bass.
The repetition and the singing along created this air of togetherness, and Paoro made sure to point it out, remarking, “There’s a really good vibe in here!” She was right. There was just something about the raw feeling in her delivery. Some of her high notes came out rather grating to the ears, but it felt meant to be, just like how many life experiences can be startling and uncomfortable. It was something to behold, and it was something to remind us that we were born whole. After the last song the crowd pleaded for an encore of “One! More! Song!” but Paoro and her band had to load offstage to make way for the final act of the night.
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THE L MAGAZINE - On Doe Paoro and the Influence of R&B on Indie Rock
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Maybe it was when Dirty Projectors released “Stillness Is The Move;” maybe it was when Solange Knowl...Maybe it was when Dirty Projectors released “Stillness Is The Move;” maybe it was when Solange Knowles released her cover of the same song. Sometime around then, the influence of R&B on a certain segment of underground music became undeniable. The work of Doe Paoro, currently in the middle of a month-long residency at Williamburg’s Cameo Gallery, serves as an interesting example of where this movement—bringing together one generation’s pop sensibility with another’s fondness for DIY and underground spaces—might be headed. Some of the artists sharing bills with her during this period come from the more esoteric or experimental side of things—Thrill Jockey avant-dub artist Jason Urick, for instance. Yet Paoro herself is capable of both tapping into eccentric musical traditions and making deeply accessible pop music. Some of her recent album, Slow to Love, heads into decidedly strange territory—running her vocals through layers of distortion, for instance, or creating claustrophobic spaces around her voice on the title track. Elsewhere, she mines a more traditional vein. “Can’t Leave You” is a properly torchy ballad, structured around a piano melody and occasionally featuring swelling backing vocals.
Paoro is far from the only artist right now to marry an underground sensibility with unabashedly pop influences. Watching How to Dress Well play a DIY space last winter was a study in contradictions: on the one hand, it was iconoclastic enough to fit there, but the mood was light-years away from watching a more experimental act there. And while Tom Krell’s music has the sort of density and blissed-out tendencies that appeal to many a fan of ambient/drone music, it’s also clearly coming from an R & B tradition.
This crossover between indie and R & B isn’t exactly a new thing; just listen to Dub Narcotic Sound System’s 1996 song “Ship to Shore” (with vocals from Lois Maffeo)—it’s not intended as pastiche, but rather an as example of a style that all of the musicians involve clearly love. And I suspect that the influence of Prince, whether musical or aesthetic (or both), has also played a part in this resurgence of R&B in DIY scenes. (The music of Autre Ne Veut, in particular, comes to mind here.)
On the flip side of this crossover moment are artists who seem to be paying tribute to the genre’s most sentimental side. The Minneapolis-based Gayngs are perhaps the most self-referential of the bunch, and yet the style (mostly) works; “The Last Prom On Earth,” for instance, sounds both like a condensed version of the style and an excellent example of it. At the same time, there’s the tendency of parts of this to veer into overt emulation of the most sentimental and least (musically) interesting aspects of mid-90s pop—Bon Iver’s “Beth/Rest,” I’m looking at you. For now, at least, Paoro’s songs remain memorable for both their catchier aspects and the more offbeat aspects of their production. That she’s equally at home with large-scale ballads and Future Islands covers suggests a promising sense of balance at work in her own aesthetic sensibility.
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THE EXAMINER - Artist to Watch: Brooklyn's Own Songstress Doe Paoro
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Refreshing, genuinely great new music is hard to come by, right? Right. If you’ve all but given up o...Refreshing, genuinely great new music is hard to come by, right? Right. If you’ve all but given up on hearing something you haven’t heard before then kindly tune your ears onto Brooklyn based lady Doe Paoro. For fans of Lykke Li, CoCo Rosie and Cat Power, she’s a divine treat.
Doe’s debut album “Slow to Love” debuted a few weeks ago and is available on iTunes as well as her bandcamp page. It’s one thing for an album to be so flawlessly written, recorded and performed, but it’s another to accurately portray the beauty during a live performance. A struggle that Doe Paoro is clearly not worried about because she’s nailed it.
Taking the stage downstairs at Lower East Side’s Pianos, Doe Paoro almost possessed the crowd (which managed to sell out the place) with her commanding voice and earthy sound effects, produced on a separate mic. The perfect opening track on the album (“Born Whole”) translated to the perfect opening song. Even with a drum mishap that seemed to have omit the instrument entirely, Doe carried the song effortlessly. If you had never heard the song before, you would have never guessed it originally had the drums (though Doe later ended her set with the correct version of “Born Whole”).
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Doe Paoro held her own – the tiny songstress danced around the stage and performed her songs with fury. The upbeat songs got their share of movement and the slower, more intense tunes (heartbreaking “Can’t Leave You”) got their fair share of emotional debauchery onstage. During the middle of her set, a fan turned to her friend and exclaimed, “this girl doesn’t even need the microphone!”
If this is what this young artist is like in the budding phase of her music career, Doe Paoro is going to be a wrecking ball for other artists in no time.
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DOE PAORO
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Like every other blogger we get plenty of emails. Well, when we say plenty, we figured out we get on...Like every other blogger we get plenty of emails. Well, when we say plenty, we figured out we get one every 11 minutes, all day, every day. It’s somewhat boring to go on about it, but our point is that there’s a whole stack of music waiting in our inbox every time we fire up our Gmail. Naturally, we don’t like to miss out on any exciting artists, so we do our best to wade through when we get time, although it’s more like using a thimble to bail out The Titanic. Sometimes this means that we have to rush through songs. We give them as much time as we can, but on the odd occasion we are found hurriedly skipping through the song, especially if it hasn’t grabbed us immediately. Those tunes which do grab us from the outset get more time. It’s not a perfect solution, but we would be there all day if we gave every tune it’s full three to six minutes. Every now and again though, one bowls you over. It doesn’t just get played in full, it arrests you faster than a dodgy copper in a bad mood and has our finger glued to the repeat button. Today Doe Paoro did exactly that. You have been warned, this is a stop-whatever-you’re-doing moment.
This is music for grown ups, in that it’s dark and somewhat scary, so much so that even the adults are likely to be cowering behind the sofas as they listen. Doe Paoro, aka Sonia Kreitzer, describes her music as “ghost soul“, which confirms the haunting imagery her songs clearly provoke, but there’s a rounded set of curves to her otherwise sparse piano-and-vocal constructions. It’s also bursting with originality, as she uses her vocal talents – and this is a major talent – to produce sounds that weave unique inventiveness throughout each song. In recent months she’s earned some useful coverage in her home borough of Brooklyn, with write ups in magazines such as The Deli and coverage on the established music blog, Brooklyn Vegan, as well as appearances on East Village Radio. Now she’s filtering through to the press this side of the Atlantic, with the below video premiering on NME.com on February 8th.
The first thing to emerge from her was a wonderful cover of Future Island‘s Little Dreamer, which completely recreates it from the ground up, well, more like from six feet under and up. The vocals hold it together over a piano that has it’s keys played so sparsely it’s as if every note takes the time to be gently woken up before being heard. Her voice seems slightly fried, as if being delivered through the television in Poltergeist, but even with all this in mind it still attracts, rather than spooks. Like James Blake, it’s her ability to tap into the melody that works so well. It’s not a ghost she produces, but the soul ripped from the ghost. This white girl soul is found once again with Can’t Leave You, which has vocals strengths akin to Adele, showing us a level of skill that can only be obtained with some classical training. Yes it warbles and wails, but there’s also melancholy cotton-picker’s texture to it throughout. She plays the heart-strings like a violin that’s being plucked, with a tension and a bleak sadness bleeding all over it.
Born Whole is equally as unplugged, once more bringing us tones and shades associated with James Blake, beginning with a styled, almost TuneYards-like vocal oddness. This apparently comes from her study of Lhamo, which we’ve been informed is an unusual Tibetan method of vocal operatics, something she discovered when recently travelling alone through the Himalayas. It’s sourcing inspirations such as these that weave elements of such originality in her music. The hip hop confidence then arrives as the chain-gang beat begins to thud the march. It all combines to secure a truly fine piece of timeless songcraft, and the video is just as thoughtful. It sets up the debut album, Slow To Love, very nicely indeed. It’s due out next week, on February 14th, and promises to stir all who encounter it. She may describe her songs as ghostly, but what the listener doesn’t realise is that it’s as if this artist really enters the room once you’ve committed to the play button. Your stereo becomes the Ouija board, the air turns ice cold and you’ll witness something you cannot prepare yourself for. Sometimes we never quite know the reasons why we’re compelled to listen to an artist in full, rather than simply deleting it and moving on, but with Doe Paoro we get it – she possessed us, and sorry, but as soon as you click play on the below buttons you too will be just as entranced. (MB)
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THE LINE OF BEST FIT - Listen: Doe Paoro – Hallelujah
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New York born singer and instrumentalist Doe Paoro garnered some attention for her debut album last ...New York born singer and instrumentalist Doe Paoro garnered some attention for her debut album last year.
Slow to Love was marked out for its fusion of minimalist post-dubstep production and her unusual and affecting vocal tones.
Well traveled, in recent months she has spent time living and writing in Sweden, and wandering the Himalayas alone, studying a form of Tibetan opera known as the Lhamo. As a Brooklyn native with a thirst for musical exploration, the influences on her forthcoming album are sure to be strange and wonderful. Further reason to be intrigued is the whisper of collaborations with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Peter Moren of Peter Bjorn & John.
Next month Paoro will head to SXSW for a number of live performances but before that, there’s the little matter of this haunting cover of Leonard Cohen’s challenging classic ’Hallelujah’. Challenging in that it’s difficult to make a song everyone’s heard a million times before sound like your own.
The trick here is not to over blow the vocals or rearrange melodies from recognition, from the first hint of Yuri Hart’s delicate cello and as Paoro’s voice rises and falls during the sweeping harmonies of the song, there’s something unsettling and utterly absorbing about the seemingly effortless way it all sounds so simple.
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Live Review: Doe Paoro Debut Show at Pianos
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Alt-Soul, Brooklyn based artist Doe Paoro (former Sonia's Party) played her debut live show at Lower...Alt-Soul, Brooklyn based artist Doe Paoro (former Sonia's Party) played her debut live show at Lower East Side bar Pianos on Tuesday. She soon made clear that this new project - miles away from her previous party band - is mostly centered around vocal experimentation. Accompanied by piano, drums and cello, Doe Paoro opened singing into 2 microphones with different vocal effects, which created an ethereal reverberation around her stunning voice. Throughout the show, the singer's vocal exploration ranged from a soulful croon, to guttural cries, to rasping whispers. She controlled the room with an effortless calm, staring into the eyes of the audience, and reinforcing the songs' feeling with undeniable stage presence. - Chelsea Eriksen
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SOUL TO THE MAX WITH DOE PAORO [VIDEO]
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Brooklyn songstress Doe Paoro is prepping her debut LP, Slow To Love, for a Valentine’s Day release,...Brooklyn songstress Doe Paoro is prepping her debut LP, Slow To Love, for a Valentine’s Day release, but from the looks and sound of this video/song combo for “Born Whole”, it’s going to more like the anti-. Looking to catch this soul princess live in concert? Paoro is hosting her album release party on February 13 right here in New York City at Glasslands. Enjoy the video and stay tuned for more.
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Introducing Doe Paoro
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It’s not often that an artist can demand absolute attention with just a couple tracks — Chelsea Wolf...It’s not often that an artist can demand absolute attention with just a couple tracks — Chelsea Wolfe, Brittany Howard and Lana Del Ray (love her or hate her, she got your attention) are three that come to mind over the past twelve months — and now the piano-playing, heartbreaking, Doe Paoro can be added to that list of female vocalists who all bring something classic, yet modern, to this crowded music scene.
A quick search will uncover that Paoro (PAH-ro), given name Sonia Kreitzer, went to high school in New York and college in Ohio before moving to San Francisco and starting the bluesy/alt rock band Heaven with Your Boots On. In 2006 she moved to Brooklyn and started another band called Sonia’s Party before embarking on a solo trip to the Himalayas. In was on this journey that the seeds for Doe Paoro were planted. She returned to New York with a new-found sense of spirituality and love for Tibetan opera, which explains the all encompassing sound of her first single, Can’t Leave You — it sounds like it could have been recorded in the one of those long abandoned halls of the Potala Palace.
Keep an ear out for her debut album, Slow To Love, in 2012. In the meantime, enjoy the first single, a Future Islands cover and an opera recording below.
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Future Islands, Ed Schrader's Music Beat & Zomes @ Bowery Ballroom (pics)
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« Deer Tick pees in new video, playing Brooklyn Bowl on New Year's Eve ++++ Diamond Rugs release Chr...« Deer Tick pees in new video, playing Brooklyn Bowl on New Year's Eve ++++ Diamond Rugs release Christmas song (MP3) | Clothing store Forever 21 pulls replica of Kurt Cobain's handmade Flipper shirt »
Posted in music | pictures on December 5, 2011
Future Islands, Ed Schrader's Music Beat & Zomes @ Bowery Ballroom (pics)
photos by Sarahana
Future Islands @ Bowery Ballroom
Future Islands
Released in October, Future Islands' third album, "On the Water," features cellos, violins and acoustic percussion -- along with background sounds captured outdoors at a North Carolina waterfront. The natural world also features heavily in the album's song titles, including "The Great Fire," "Give Us the Wind" and the title track.
Add to that songs such as "Before the Bridge" and "Tybee Island," and there seems to be an elemental theme. But Cashion says "On the Water" is not a concept record.
"This is a group of songs that work well together as an album," he says. "But there was no underlying concept we were discussing when we wrote it. I feel like it takes a certain kind of band to make a true concept record. I'm not sure we're that kind of band." [expressnightout]
Future Islands are officially in their native Baltimore after concluding their US tour in support of Over The Water over the weekend. Falling toward the end of those dates was Bowery Ballroom on 12/1 which also featured tourmates Ed Schrader's Music Beat as well as Zomes. Pictures from that show are in this post.
Future Islands' US tour kicked off in late October and also included stops at Hopscotch, FYFest, and Fun Fun Fun Fest. The band has a couple days off now, but will play a pair of UK dates at the end of this week including ATP's Nightmare before Christmas. They'll then return to tour Europe in Feb/March next year.
In related news, Doe Paoro released a cover of Future Islands' "Little Dreamer" which you can stream, with all dates and more pics from Bowery, below...
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Doe Paoro “Can’t Leave You” C=T
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Her poignant vocals are the type that make you feel butterflies in the pit of your stomach like witn...Her poignant vocals are the type that make you feel butterflies in the pit of your stomach like witnessing your love at first sight.
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Doe Paoro
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Kreitzer’s soulful voice is impenetrable, pinned against the backdrop of cello, violin and piano. Th...Kreitzer’s soulful voice is impenetrable, pinned against the backdrop of cello, violin and piano. That description alone should do it for you (and make all regular readers know why I love it so much), but Kreitzer does so much more. She’s not afraid to test her vocal limits (both high and low), and I like that. I like it a lot. Doe Paoro, you slay me.
supersonic
