Catharsix — Why You Should Be Listening To Dani Sylvia
I have a bad memory. I can barely remember what I did yesterday and don’t ask me to get within more than a 2 day radius of your birthday, but I have an uncanny ability to remember the first time I heard songs that I love. I can tell you when, where, how, every last detail. It must be something chemical, getting that massive serotonin rush that you only get from the first hit of a great song. My brain just thinks “Yes, this is important, I want to hold on to this memory”. And I vividly remember the first time I heard Dani Sylvia.
It was my birthday a couple of years ago and I’d gone for a frosty morning walk in the local park. I like to listen to Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist every week as it makes me feel like I’m at least vaguely down with the kids, but it’s a mostly masochistic activity; heading down the Song Mines in search of gold but coming up empty-handed and covered in crud. That week, however, they included the song Hotel Room by Dani Sylvia and it literally stopped me in my tracks. I’d struck gold. Who was this, who’d dropped a pulsing slinky dark synth line into the mix and was now singing about casual sex and self-loathing with an alarming frankness. By the time she’d gasped “stranger in the dark tell me that I deserve this, ‘cos I’m nothing but bad, bad blood” I was sold. This was my kinda shit.
I sacked off the rest of the playlist and went straight to Dani Sylvia’s profile to get everything on there in my ears as quickly as possible. At this point in time, she was most of the way through an ambitious series of six EPs called Catharsix (I love a good pun, this was getting better and better!) that have now been released as an album. She has a whole wealth of songs, mostly cooked up in her bedroom with co-conspirators Barnaby Cox and Rhys Fletcher, but Catharsix is one of those records that feels like a bold statement of intent, a complete package. It shows off an insane range of styles and moods but comes together as a portrait of an artist at the epicentre of a creative explosion. I mean, if you listened to it blind, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a Greatest Hits compilation from a major label singer who’d got multiple bestsellers under her belt. The fact that it was mostly recorded at home by an unsigned artist is mind-boggling.
There’s no doubt that Dani Sylvia is a “pop” artist but pop is by no means a dirty word in my book (don’t worry, there’s plenty of those elsewhere on Catharsix tho). It’s pop in that it’s accessible and plunders the rich history of mainstream music for its influences. It’s pop in that the production is sleek and crisp and easy on the ears. But it’s by no means disposable or empty-headed. I’ve written before (in my post about Exit Eden) about why pop music with heart is the best kind of music. It’s all about dramatically heightened emotions, big feelings wrapped up in big hooks, and that’s what gets my heart pumping. Feelings are confusing. It’s easy to intellectualise them and think we understand them but sometimes difficult to actually process them. Dialling them up to 11 in a big pop songs is a great way to scream them out, to cry them out, to purge them and get them out of your head and into the open where they belong. It’s why pop music has endured so long and why it’s so important (especially when growing up, while feelings are that their most bewildering and new). Dani Sylvia gets this 100% and her cathartic, high-emotion pop is a balm for mixed-up, ripped-up hearts.
The six EPs that combine (Megazord-style) to form Catharsix each take a different tone and, when assembled in order, give it the feel of a high concept album in six movements. It begins with Eye For An Eye, three songs of jealous rage that are in turn funny, tragic and abrasive. Dani Sylvia’s ever-present gallows humour is on full display here and it’s what keeps things from just being an emo sobfest. She sees the funny side in even her darkest moments when transforming them into songs. From here, the album works its way through romantic fantasy (although Dani claims any love songs she writes are addressed to either her mum or to a cat), loneliness, loss and existential pondering, through to the final chapter, Author, which brings it all together and paints a picture of someone who’s become stronger as a result of what she’s gone through.
Musically, it’s impossible to pin this stuff down. There’s off-kilter synthpop, piano ballads, stadium rock, full-blown R&B, gospel, rap, I’m not even scratching the surface. But while she’s content to be a musical chameleon, her astonishing multi-octave vocal range and the sheer intimacy of her lyrics make it feel consistent. There’s never a feeling that she’s trying on someone else’s musical clothes. This is entirely her own fashion line. There’s no dull moments throughout Catharsix’s twenty songs but a couple of them really stand out for me. The Shame is an absolute heartwrencher of a break-up song, one of the few times the humour gets stripped away entirely and Dani explores some really tough themes. On the flip side is the album closer, Begin Again, that offers hope and power over a lively, almost militaristic pop-rap backdrop. Burning Tree is another epic ballad that starts quiet and builds into an fearsome hurricance of overlaid guitars and howling vocals. And, of course, Hotel Room, which still sounds every bit as jaw-dropping as on that frosty morning when I first heard it.
Dani Sylvia’s been bubbling under the surface of London’s music scene for a while but I think with Catharsix now available in a handy package that you can send to your friends and say “hey, listen to this”, it’s the time for her to break out. Especially because, let’s face it, we’re all feeling like shit after 2020 so Dani’s unique brand of self-deprecating pop misery has never been more relevant. There’s new music promised for 2021 and I think it’s what the world really needs. Give your brain and your heart a hit of the good stuff.
