Núria Graham
“The roof of Whole Foods, it’s just not very rock’n’roll is it?”
In an astounding attempt to collect everything Austinites hate about South By Southwest, a horde of yuppies ascended to the top of the Lamar Street Whole Foods during the festival. It was dotted with forest green tents, selling supplements, post-vegan ice cream and a bionic app for your phone that threatened “everyone deserves dopamine” and, occasionally, bands. In the midst of the shilling, a white, dreadlocked hippy guarded his soundboard like a harpy, growling at anyone who came within breathing distance. Including an unfortunate Núria Graham.
Despite the not very rock’n’roll setting and a sound guy who would’ve preferred musicians not to exist, Graham and her band put on an enrapturing and transformative set. They briefly allowed a swaying crowd to pretend they weren’t surrounded by late-capitalist health freaks. It was also St. Patrick’s day and, despite Graham’s Irish heritage, she wasn’t wearing any green. Over a latte the next day, Graham lamented that she’s “not a very good Irishman.”
That lineage and her roots in Catalonia have fused together to bring a dark, surreal humor to her music. Her newest album, Cyclamen, is a technicolor trek, as sweeping, colorful and mad as The Wizard Of Oz. It’s filled with pristinely composed chamber pop with a jazzy backbone. Regina Spector and Joni Mitchell’s most off-kilter work are the closest comparisons, but Graham’s own unique background has brought a winking absurdism to her work. In person, she’s jovial, curious, quick with a laugh, but ready at a drop of a hat to dive, with intensity, into deeper, troubling subjects. Graham’s Aunt passed away before the album was released, and her specter looms over the record, Graham preforming a wake for her relative, and her own soul, in the record’s somber moments. Cyclamen and Graham provide gleaming puzzleboxes to unlock over dozens of listens, all while they worm into the subconscious. And Graham often sees herself as the outside catalyst for the music; its channeler rather than the leader.
“There's a sense of irony that I use sometimes and when I'm speaking English because I feel like I'm another person. When I write, sometimes I get surprised because it seems like a mistake even. Or maybe it is like a mistake of not speaking English in a normal way,” she explains.
But Graham’s funhouse English allows for an engaging sense of disquiet. On single “Yes It’s Me, The Goldfish!” Graham travels through a history of trauma like it’s a Dalí painting, lashing grief interrupted by jolts of dadaism. She even breaks the fourth wall as she recalls an acquaintance dying of immolation before turning to the crowd, whispering “how fucked up is that?”
Though Cyclamen constantly wrestles with grief, she doesn’t puncture all of her breathless, beautiful songs with sadness. Album bookends “Procida” and “Procida 2” paint wistful impressions of Graham’s time on the Italian island, in a self-imposed isolation.
“I was there three weeks ago to kind of close the center of it. So it was like a spiritual thing to do. It's a very small island with a lot of fishermen, but it's a very peaceful place. It seems like a little island, like a place that time stops in.”
Procida, both as a physical reality and an imagined setting, is flecked with fantasy and serves as the bedrock for Cyclamen. It’s also where Graham ponders her own relationship with nostalgia, both its sweetness and insidiousness. When asked if she’s a nostalgic person, she instantly says “yes.”
“I don't know if I'm happy about it, but it is in my nature I'm not trapped in the past, obviously, but I visited a lot.”
Though, neither nostalgia or Italy are stable settings. “Disaster in Napoli” serves as the album’s volume focal point. It became a free-jazz freakout live, with visions of earthquakes, floods and fires rocketing from the punishing noise Graham and her band dished out. And it’s not the only time that Cyclamen paws through the wreckage of the natural world’s most destructive moments. Graham took special care with the ritualistic “Fire Mountain Oh Sacred Ancient Fountain” and “Oh I Bless Thee,” a balm following the eruption and death.
“I felt like the voices were when the volcano explodes, like the different rivers of lava,” she says, explaining the chorus of voices that flow through “Fire Mountain” and, later, the reverbed, angelic ensemble of her own voice that bursts like rays of light in “Oh I Bless Thee.” In some cases, she finds it easier and more engaging to replicate nature through her voice and lyrics than looking at society. She often compares herself, without metaphor or simile, to animals or inorganic objects, becoming a goldfish, a pyroclast, a crystal shimmering in the forest.
She laughs about the goldfish, claiming nature is “more intelligent than all the shit that we make up.”
The mythological, personal and natural combine on the album’s penultimate track, “The Waterway.” Graham returns to her grief and casts it in an inevitable, but beautiful, light. Anchored by gorgeous, loping piano, Graham pins a letter to her Aunt, noting “you’re so far away it’s not like I could give you a call.”
“I see death sometimes. Like it's like a river and then it goes to the sea. And then sometimes the process is very long and we don't get to see that fast. And I just have these events, like just kind of pushing a boat.”
As the album closes, and Graham readies for a trip to LA, that boat resiliently sails onward. Off the coast of Procida, on the Waterway of the Styx and, somehow, on top of a Whole Foods.