Single Review: Julia Holter – ‘Feel You’
2 min read
Julia Holter is the master of tonal mashup, a veritable artist when it comes to taking a feeling and flipping it through itself so that it becomes something new entirely. She crafts music that is dense without ever being difficult; emotive without ever becoming overloaded. With her new single Feel You, Holter runs the gamut from baroque pop, right through spacey psychedelia, and all the way back out again to re-emerge into the world of the real.
To the uninitiated, Holter’s sound may initially be overwhelming. By refusing to fix on a single emotion, or allow herself to be bound to typical chord progressions, Holter’s music can initially feel dizzying; Feel You is a thousand things at once, all over the space of a mere four minutes and nine seconds. Though the piece is bolstered by a haunting refrain, Holter floats through different states. At times her vocal delivery is clipped, and authoritative; at other times she sounds primal and unchained.
Not to imply that Holter’s music is ever over-intellectualised, or unduly complex. Indeed, though her myriad of emotional states are hard to describe, the music ultimately feels thrillingly simple. It’s as though by pushing through a seemingly endless gamut of patterns, signs and symbols, Holter has come through the other side, bringing music that is at once entirely new, and yet utterly relatable at the same time. In short: Feels You is another distinctive hit from an artist who hasn’t released a dud track yet.
