Home [LP]

Ziur - Home [LP]

On her fifth album, Ziur considers not just what home symbolizes from her perspective, but the word's resonance to the diverse community that surrounds her, and how their stories have impacted her over the years. Indeed, it's the first time she's felt it necessary to examine her own nationality. In the past, she's deliberately avoided labelling herself as German, feeling disconnected from her country's politics, culture and even the German language itself. Stepping up to provide a different narrative, Ziur scours her soul, writing and singing in German for the first time and proposing growth and evolution, not fear and regression. A solemn mood permeates the album's opening track 'Brown is the Color', and Ziur sings in measured, slow-motion breaths over noisy synth oscillations and doomed piano flourishes. Already, it's a significant departure from her last run of releases, veering away from the frenetic, satirical chaos of 2023's Hakuna Kulala-released Eyeroll or its fantastical, dubby predecessor Antifate. Ziur pulls on real world insights here, tracing her oldest, dearest musical inspirations to present her origins to anybody who might be listening. It's pop music in its own way, inverted and reconstructed to fit snugly into her well-established sonic landscape. On ''No Yawn,'' brittle, downsampled hi-hats and industrial scrapes ping-pong around distorted riffs, provided by James O Ceallaigh aka WIFE. Even the beatless ''All Odds No Chants,'' a collaboration with Elvin Brandhi and Sara Persico, reveals another room in Ziur's autobiographical suite. An openness carries the whole record, whether she's crying harsh truths over damaged orchestral scrapes on the album's goth-y title track, or duetting with Manchester's Iceboy Violet on ''Through the Trees.'' On the former, Ziur's voice soars, echoing hypnotically over unsettling analog distortions and gnarled strings. It's one of the eeriest and most beautiful tracks she's penned, camouflaging its broken electronics with ghostly moans and theatrical punctuations. By inviting in her own demons, Ziur has been able to write her most personal album. Her relationship with home will always be thorny, but through music, she's been able to create a place to exist that's truly comfortable and protective. A1. Brown Is The Color_x000D_ A2. Tame_x000D_ A3. No Yawn_x000D_ A4. All Odds No Chants (Feat. Sara Persico & Elvin Brandhi)_x000D_ A5. Im Bann Der Wehenden Fahnen_x000D_ A6. No Place Like_x000D_ B1. Home_x000D_ B2. Spellbound To Ancestral Curse_x000D_ B3. Though The Trees (Feat. Iceboy Violet)_x000D_ B4. Nowhere Everywhere (Feat. Elvin Brandhi & Sara Persico)_x000D_ B5. Who, Me?