- Ioanna Gika has been providing the big voice that fronts LA-based dream-pop band IO Echo for the last half a decade. IO Echo, a collaborative project with Leopold (brother of Atticus) Ross is still plodding along in its muted, gothic industrial manner, but Ioanna clearly has greater ambitions than adding colour to that livid background.
So much has been obvious from the very first taste of her debut, solo album, Thalassa (Greek for ‘the sea’) in early single and album opener, Roseate. The very name references feelings of optimism and idealism, a new, rosy-fingered dawn. With a swell of harp, Gika wastes no time in making good on such promise. Sudden creative turns abound, beginning with a fizz of synth-wave arpeggio, an unusual but not unwelcome partner to the harp. Just as quickly it melts into old fashioned guitar pop which proves to be only a bridge into galloping industrial rock that surges until it verges on hardcore techno. It’s mercurial enough to be silly, a caricature of itself, but it’s impossible to really think about that as Gika’s voice soars majestically across the top, a sweet roar, bellowing about crumbling cities, new statues and blinding light.
You have a blueprint for the album there: the relentless creativity and a throw-caution-to-the-wind fusionist sensibility that is impatiently trying to suture together every bit of gothic electronica from the last twenty years along with the reckless courage to do it with the biggest, cheesiest gestures possible.
There are easy connections to be drawn to someone like Zola Jesus who’s own, increasingly eclectic approach to the gothic diaspora makes moments of quite deep similarity unsurprising. So too -as Gika foregrounds her voice more strongly- you can hear a richness that wasn’t often apparent in her dream pop material. It’s not ever going to be the colour of Jesus’ contralto, but it is more significant than might previously have been appreciated.
If you switch out dream pop’s guitars for synth-driven ambient sounds and especially if you do what Ioanna Gika does and carelessly throw in artificial strings and synth-brass choirs whenever you feel like it, the whole feel can get surprisingly new age. There are moments on Thalassa which made me think of Enya for the first time in years. If you reckon that’s too harsh, perhaps we can agree that there are moments on Thalassa that exhibit real similarities to the cheesiest cuts from Dead Can Dance.
Even when the lyrics drift back from the fiery, mystical visions that thundered across the opening of Thalassa and into more traditional, romantic territory and staid synth-pop, like the slow, melancholy ebb of more recent single Swan, featuring lyrical fare like “Froze a memory / Captured our love perfectly, but ice in hand won't last / Longing for the past” I don’t find my interest waning. I have a quite high threshold for pop schlock to begin with and anyway, for every such gesture you’ll hear an echo of Arca, Björk or Chelsea Wolfe.
Six years of working towards a common goal has given Ioanna Gika a burning desire to express herself on her own terms. Her impatience is unsettling, even confronting and it’s a job of work to even hold on through the whirlwind, gothic tour that is Thalassa. It’s at least as much of a shock to come out the other end and discover that all these wild gestures join together to form a fully realised debut. The sea may lash the shore, but from it has emerged Ioanna Gika, in no uncertain terms.
- Chris Cobcroft.