Top Of The World
After just recently receiving the German Record Critics' Award Israeli phenomenon Victoria Hanna's eponymous debut longplayer was just reviewed for the forthcoming January/February 2019 issue (#144) of UK's Songlines magazine, where it received a highly gratifying five-star review along with the coveted "Top Of The World" label.
Here's the entire review by Asher Breuer-Weil, which fills our hearts with joy:
>> Israeli singer explores the space between rebellion and servitude
Victoria Hanna was born into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family deep in the heart of Jerusalem. On one side of the family tree she had a grandmother named Victoria, a rebellious woman who stood up to the servitude of women in the Orthodox community, and on the other side she had Hanna, a woman far more withdrawn and submissive to her fate. Both, she says, were deeply important figures in her life.
The album embraces these two personalities. The first five songs are like Victoria: bold and dramatic, underpinned by wild drum beats and punchy Hebrew raps. The final five songs resemble the gentler Hanna, stripping back the compositions with singing over soft string and piano melodies. As can be heard on the aptly-named 'Kala Dekalya' (Voice of All Voices), the purity of her singing is simply breathtaking.
But there is more to the album than the juxtaposition between Victoria and Hanna. It delves into the very nature of the human voice, playing on the Kabbalistic differentiation between dibor (speech) and kal (voice). As Victoria Hanna says: 'Voice is abstract... Speech is concrete.' Her rapping of the Hebrew alphabet on one song conveys the concreteness of speech, while the unspeakable beauty of her singing also shows how fluid it can be. <<
If you haven't yet, you can listen to the entire album via the SoundCloud player above or stream/buy here.
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