- Vanessa Marousopoulos’ debut EP under the moniker Keeskea comes hotly anticipated by the two cities she calls home, Adelaide and Brisbane. If you’ve seen her in any number of local acts, including Bloom Parade and Sleep Club, you’d already be familiar with her particular brand of enchantment. With total control over the suite of tracks on Find Yourself Alone, she only grows more spellbinding.
The first thing that stands out over the five tracks is the gentle precision Vanessa uses to pull apart tangled webs of relationships and memories and emotion. She pins them neatly into organised poetry which is neither too vague or prescriptive. The result feels like inhabiting a secret oasis with a new friend: there’s the warm delight in being trusted with something tangibly precious and the thrill of recognising something shared between one another. Take Forfeit, for example. The track was released as a single last year, and its reckoning with mental health is so bracing Vanessa says she almost revised it before release. The hook is completely disarming, as she sings: “And I've got nothing left /To show for it /Forfeit”.
It’s funny that two Australian cities claim Keeskea, seeing as how the most compelling quality of Vanessa’s work here is it’s duality. All of the songs on the EP are built on a foundation of folky guitar lines, embellished by the warmth of a violin and the occasional twinkle of glockenspiel. When she introduces foreign instrumentation, it melds into the existing naturalism rather than splintering against it.
Just past the midpoint of I’d Doubt, her vocal line glitches, is bent and refracted as though it’s been sent through a prism. It evokes Big Thief or Bon Iver, two artists who also work in a painterly manner, experimenting with mark-making from a varied toolbox. Later on,Too Much To Ask! features an electronic blip which punctuates long violin bowing like a heartbeat - it reminds me of the train whistle in Phoebe Bridgers’ Scott Street, triggering a momentum that allows the song to breathe.
Find Yourself Alone is a little like a diary, a little like a sketchbook. On the EP, Vanessa Marousopoulos proves herself as one of the most striking experimental artists emerging at the moment. With such a rich palette to draw on, I’m looking forward to more masterpieces from Keeskea.
- Aleisha McLaren.