★★★★★
?????????? Versions, the fourth Zola Jesus LP in as many years, might best be described as a set of self-covers; with one exception, these are new takes on existing tracks. Originating in a performance at the Guggenheim Museum at the end of the world tour supporting her last record, Conatus (2011), Zola Jesus, née Nika Roza Danilova, worked with no-wave legend J.G. "Foetus" Thirlwell to create new arrangements for her songs, with the Mivos Quartet performing them...
- www.glidemagazine.com
2013-09-14
★★★★★
Zola Jesus
Versions
[Sacred Bones; 2013]
By Ray Finlayson ; September 3, 2013
Purchase at: Insound (Vinyl) | Amazon (MP3 & CD) | iTunes | MOG
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Bringing strings into the mix often leads to the clichéd assumption of slowing down an artist's music, drawing out notes for dramatic effect and poignancy...
- beatsperminute.com
2013-09-04
★★★★★
Available on: Sacred Bones LP When, last year, Nika 'Zola Jesus' Danilova was commissioned for a one-off performance in New York's prestigious Guggenheim museum, she enlisted composer J.G Thirlwell - of Foetus and other projects - to aid in arranging her songs for string quartet. Reenacted live in the studio shortly after, the eight new Versions collected here sometimes enhance the original recordings, and sometimes detract from them...
- www.factmag.com
2013-08-30
★★★★★
Crikey, the Guggenheim. The 'Temple of the Spirit'. Yup if you want to wrap up your world-tour shenanigans in style, it's definitely preferable to do so at an illustrious Modern Art Mecca rather than the Nag's Head Bar & Grill in Slough. If you can also do so with a swanky string quartet and a Zappa-esque, Gonzo genius with enough aliases to make you suspect he's some subterranean supercriminal (Arranger JG Thirwell AKA "Foetus" AKA "Scraping Foetus off the Wheel" AKA "You've got Foetus on your...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-08-30
★★★★★
Crikey, the Guggenheim . The 'Temple of the Spirit'. Yup if you want to wrap up your world-tour shenanigans in style, it's definitely preferable to do so at an illustrious Modern Art Mecca rather than the Nag's Head Bar & Grill in Slough. If you can also do so with a swanky string quartet and a Zappa-esque, Gonzo genius with enough aliases to make you suspect he's some subterranean supercriminal (Arranger JG Thirwell AKA "Foetus" AKA "Scraping Foetus off the Wheel" AKA "You've got Foetus on...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-09-04
★★★★★
Inspired by a string quartet-backed performance at New York's Guggenheim Museum, Versions delivers what the name implies--alternate takes of songs from her back catalog. At times, Nika Roza Danilova's opera-trained voice sounds overly formal against the string-only instrumentation. But the compositions benefit from her willingness to shed her electro goddess skin. "It hurts to let you in," she sings on heartbreaking closer, "Collapse." We can truly feel her pain.
- filtermagazine.com
2013-08-27
★★★★★
When bringing together two such eclectic, often esoteric artists as Australian avant-garde musician J.G. Thirlwell and Wisconsin's Russian-American experimental rock singer Nika Roza Danilova, aka Zola Jesus, there is an inherent fear that the end product could turn out to be messy, over-thought, and far too obtuse for its own good. Fortunately though, the creative minds of Thirlwell and Danilova have time and again demonstrated the capacity for enough good ideas to avoid such a pitfall...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2013-08-27
★★★★★
8
Critical Mass
Release Date: August 20, 2013Label: Sacred Bones
Little-known fact about Zola Jesus: She's a soprano. Classically trained in opera, the 24-year-old singer born Nika Roza Danilova exalts in the murky, gothic boom of her songs, with deep swoops that evoke a sort of modern-day Gregorian chant: gorgeously melancholic vocals backed by expansive electronic landscapes, all speckled with bursts of...
- www.spin.com
2013-08-27
★★★★★
"Blog hot" is a description--which, if it doesn't exist already, consider this its invention--with one of the shortest half-lives in the English language. It's a naturally unwieldy phrase with no clear standardization. No one can define just how many blogs it takes to ordain one as "hot," nor is there any agreement about which ones are truly capable of breaking new bands...
- www.slantmagazine.com
2013-08-26
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