Nicola Lester

NICOLA LESTER – COLOURS

Author:Aidan Roberts

Melbournite Nicola Lester carries an air of the modern loner, possessing the same elfen phrasing and whispery vocal timbre of Cat Power and Emiliana Torrini. Her acutely arranged acoustic instrumentation, horns and double-tracked melodies are rather bewitching from the outset; even the mysterious artwork, a collection of masquerade photographs of Lester in flamboyant costuming in humblingly bleak and simple locations serves to illustrate the vibe of this record well. She is a creature of the quietly understated. Elements of her elder generation sometimes appear, such as the Judee Sill-esque musical-hall romp Turn It Over and the deliciously bittersweet Don’t Stop Believing.The sonics here are sparse, Lester’s piano is milky and house-bound, the drums quietly patter away, Libby Chow’s french horn eerily thrums here and there. The title track is probably as close as the album gets to garnering a pop hit – and it is here, in a nutshell she nails the sentiment of her dark folk message – “it’s the colours that smooth the wood, it’s the colours that make the bad things good”.
- Alternative Media Group

COLOURS IS THE DRUM MEDIA SINGLE OF THE WEEK
By Jason Kenny

"This is the first taste from Lester's forthcoming debut by the same name and it's all minamalist lo-fi piano beauty. Think Blasko singing Cat Power tunes with piano in an abandoned wooden house. Then some haunting trumpet comes in...gold!
It's subdued, well performed, capatalising on the lo-fi aesthetic better than most.
The b-side, All we dreamed draws even more heavily on the Cat Power reference - surely that's a riff from one of Chan Marshalls albums - but what Lester does with it makes it all her own."


- Drum Media, Perth, Australia

BY CHRIS JOHNSTON December 2009

It's interesting when musicians choose to use nothing but their own plain name under which to release - to "brand" - their music. Interesting because it dosn't happen much. It's brave, I think. Nicola Lester from Melbourne, for example, hasn't even released any music before except for the wonderous, bare soundtrack to the Cannes-winning short film Cracker Bag in 2003. That was when she was a music student. Now comes the archetypal brave, emotionally wrought and beautifully tender solo album under her own name and no others, Colours, using our, not the Americanised, spelling, featuring a set of winsome cameos from Clare Bowditch's French horn player Libby Chow. Songs about feelings, journeys and sensations and such. Sounds like Nico or Cat Power and very, very good indeed. - The Age Newspaper, Melbourne (Fairfax Media)

By Clem Bastow

"It's been an exceptionally strong year for local female singer/songwriters, and Nicola Lester's captivating Colours is another example. In a similar vein, if you play like that, to Sarah Blasko's more delicate moments, Colours is an offbeat, low-key gem; B-side All We Dreamed has an ethereal, eccentric quality that recalls Scout Niblett's earlier-decade work. Both song suggest that Colours the album will be one worth keeping an ear/eye out for." - Inpress Magazine, Melbourne