«I don’t know if I can penetrate the mainstream. I don’t know if I want. These Spellling’s statements, expressed in an interview with Jenesaispop, reveal an yearning for the artist to climb professionally. In the interview, Spellling shows some dissatisfaction for its current place in the industry, and wonders if your music has the power to take it beyond its current position.
‘The Turning Wheel’, the third album of Californiana Christya Cabral, received a few praise, but did not make the artist a large seller of records and tickets. In his fourth album, Spellling proposes a rebranding: ‘Portrait of My Heart’ is a rock album. Of course, this “heart” is still in love with drama and mystery. It is a Spellling album after all.
Cabral account that ‘Portrait of My Heart’ is an album “about love, intimacy, anxiety and isolation.” It is not necessary to count – although it has done it in interviews – that this is also the album of an artist who consumed music of System of a Down, Radiohead or not Doubt during adolescence. A adolescence marked by the feeling of not belonging anywhere.
If the titular track of ‘Portrait of My Heart’, with his desperate cry “I Don’t Belong Here”, is the ‘Creep’ of Spellling, although the reference is not intentional; The album closes directly with a version of ‘Subtimes’ by My Bloody Valentine. Luckily, Spellling adapts it to its land, instead of reproducing its sound without turning it.
Spellling’s land is that of mysticism and theater. One of his talents is to write melodies, and thanks to them the songs of ‘Portrait of My Heart’ are held, more than those of many groups that are a lot of noise and few nuts. But a 2000 rock student knows that the melodies were in charge of the hits that we all remember. According to the guitar reinvention and the immediacy of the songs, the lyrics of ‘Portrait of My Heart’ are clear and direct.
The orchestral touches of the Spellling you remember are present in ‘Portrait of My Heart’, although they are less obvious and sound practically hidden under the layers of guitars and distortions. So much that these can distract from the fact that ‘Destiny Arrives’ sounds like a Disney song. The fantasy of ‘The Turning Wheel’, or even ‘Mazy Fly’, appears vaguely in ‘Keep It Alive’, one of the outstanding tracks, but soon the pop-punk urgency of ‘Alibi’ and ‘Waterfall’ is imposed on an album that dares to dare to dare in the Nu-Metal of System of a Down in the roar ‘Satisfaction’.
In a good rock album that has the collaboration of Robo Becel, producer of SZA, and with Psymun, producer of Yves tumor, to production, highlights the jazzy incursion in ‘Mount Analogue’, which has the very welcome vocal collaboration of Toro and Moi, neighbor of Spellling and now also a friend. In addition, Pat McCrory of Turnsile touches the guitar in ‘Alibi’, providing texture to an album that does not enter the sonic follies of Yves tumor, but that travels through various rock styles with grace and style.
