- This one caught me a bit off guard. Yasmine Hosseini is out of Perth and she’s seventeen-years-old. Generally when I get emails from seventeen-year-olds saying they have been “exploring the realm of folk music” it’s a very short journey from there to the recycle bin. I am cynical from long experience, but I feel guilty enough to try and explain: really, the music will be awful or instead I’ll suddenly be a producer for The Voice, gobbing lines like “You won’t believe what this seventeen-year-old did to make these judges cry”, or probably both. Not actually sure how I ended up pressing play on Yasmine’s Soundcloud, but I’m glad I did.
Her EP, flâner (it’s French for an aimless stroll), is a nice way of encapsulating the pretty lo-fi folk here, which floats along like a gentle whisper. For all that it is lo-fi -nearly lost in the quiet, dark, almost shapeless production background- there’s a surprising amount going on in the five tracks on offer. Quite a lot of the elements of the more tricked-out end of indie-folk-pop have slipped obsequiously in: warm piano, sweet backing vocal harmonies, unexpected jabs of exotic percussion.
Although that sets this apart from the girl and her guitar formula, to be honest, you can load more and more instruments on board and still make dross. What really separates Yasmine is at the core of her songwriting. Her voice is moody and drifts dissonantly across the acoustic guitar. Moodiness is the key emotion for teenagers, I know, but so few of them possess any of the skills necessary to express that in any way you might want to hear.
Yasmine by contrast has some of the same dark, gothic folk qualities that have made artists like Grouper or Tiny Vipers into such intriguing voices in the past. There’s something else which I couldn’t quite put my finger on till I looked up some of her other stuff on the internet. Unexpectedly, right up until the minute she released flâner, Yasmine was releasing a flood of languorous rock music, with elements of country and soul; all of it flows on into her most recent material via a similarly forbidding and gothic undercurrent. I realised the connection I was trying to make, too: Hosseini has some of the same feverish talent for the shadowy end of the roots as Gabriella Cohen, another artist who emerged from the lo-fi fuzz.
It’s always a bit dicey making calls like this. I mean, I’ve never even heard her play live. Coming out of nowhere, however, I listened, listened again and I have a feeling I’ll be hearing more of Yasmine Hosseini in years to come. Hey, but every other seventeen-year-old has got a lot more work to do.
- Chris Cobcroft.