Sylvaine: Nova | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- One-woman multi-instrumentalist, composer and singer Kathrine Shepard’s post-metal project Sylvaine boasts a masterful and unconventional body of work. Diverse and complex, Nova is her fourth full-length album to be released and reveals a wonderful and fantastical soundscape.

The album opens with a choral piece, also named Nova, and paints an ethereal scene similar to a film soundtrack. Like so many composers of fantasy soundtracks, Yuki Kajiura and Howard Shore to name a couple, Sylvaine uses a non-existent language to build a truly otherworldly atmosphere. Lilting and wistful, she forms the syllables with deliberate delivery, in a way implying they hold more meaning than the language would suggest. Also drawing from classical and sacred compositions like that of Eriks Esenvalds, her vocal harmonies hold onto their dissonance with an eerie descant floating overhead.

The second track, Mono No Aware, bursts into life, breaking the illusion of calm that Nova has just spent so much time establishing. Being almost ten minutes in length, Sylvaine takes full advantage of her full vocal range. Almost echoing the melody from Nova, she layers relatively simple vocals with an unhinged scream. There’s an expertly balanced contrast between her sweet melody, the frantic drums and guitar and her chorus of primal screeching. Fortapt also uses this juxtaposition: jumping even more suddenly from the peaceful, elven atmosphere to guttural growls.

At the core of all of Sylvaine’s pieces are her vocals and stunning yet simple melodies, which she admits are the bare bones of all her writing. It’s easy to see, when, despite the complex and layered instrumentals, her voice is always at the forefront, breaking through the chaos with control and a bright, borderline operatic timbre. Taking this to another level is Nowhere, Still Somewhere, which draws more from shoegaze and dreampop and continuously cycles the same melody over and over, adding layers of improvisational-sounding vocal texture.

With only seven tracks and lasting almost an hour, Sylvaine insists on emotional vulnerability on her latest album and demonstrates her full range of abilities and compositional styles to fully explore her ideas and themes. With deceptively static melodies floating over the top of chaotic black metal screeches, Nova may not be for everyone, but is definitely an original, diverse and masterful work.

- Alison Paris.