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‘The Devil keeps telling me lies’: Adia Victoria sings the Blues
03.15.2019
11:00 am
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“Bring her back / Drag her by her hair / Bring her back / The devil don’t care.”

I pat myself on the back because I jumped aboard the Adia Victoria train pretty early on—I’d read about her in a local free paper about a month before her debut album was released, dialed her up on Soundcloud and then I saw her play in a small club a few weeks after it came out—but by then Rolling Stone had already seen her coming. After releasing just one song she was selected for their “10 New Artists You Need to Know” roundup. She appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert almost immediately.

I guess you could say that Adia Victoria is pretty hard to miss.

A single spin of the 21st century blues of her Beyond the Bloodhounds and, man, I was hooked on that album. What an original voice! What an amazingly tight band. Her lyrics stand on their own as poetry. Surely I’m not the only one who has noticed how gorgeous she is. And she can play rhythm guitar like Keith-fucking-Richards. Adia Victoria is the complete package. It’s difficult to appraise her talents and not conclude that she is an icon in the making, or even an icon fully-formed and just waiting for the public to catch up to her. She is going to be huge and she’s going to be around for a very long time. I can’t think of a stronger talent to emerge since… since I do not know who. Several people come to mind, but all from past decades.
 

 
Silences is the name of her second album. The first thing I want to say, right up front here, is that it is goddamned amazing. The second thing I want to get across is how different it is from its shithot predecessor. Beyond the Bloodhounds roared along like Charley Patton sitting in with the Gun Club fronted by Billie Holiday with a hellhound on her trail. Silences isn’t that. It’s a different animal entirely. Oh trust me, it could have been a sophomore effort showing but a bare minimum of artistic growth and I’d still be right here right now raving about it, but it’s not as much of a guitar-based blues this time. This time it’s even more sophisticated and certainly the arrangements are more complex, but to be clear I’m not trying to convey that it is actually a better album than her debut.

It’s the equal of it and you need to hear both.

On Silences, the lady is most assuredly still singing the blues, but she is doing it very, very differently from the way she did it on her 2016 debut. That album was swampy and it rocked out. Silences, as the title might indicate to you, isn’t that. The same amazing voice, the same extremely high quality of wordsmithery, the same sense of heightened drama, the touches of evil, the tension she is so good at evoking are there in the same measure—all very good things—but the sonic palette expands here dramatically to incorporate piano, strings, synthesizers, a horn section and other “serious artist” (and larger budget) embellishments. Victoria co-produced the album with Aaron Dessner of The National at his studio in upstate New York. 

When an artist can plug so very directly into the source of the blues as Adia Victoria can, this is not a well of inspiration that’s likely to ever go dry. She’s got a quite a bit of the same artistic essence I find in Nick Cave’s work. That is a mighty goddamned statement to make about someone with but two albums under her belt, but I feel compelled to make it. She earns it. This is an artist who I would follow anywhere. When Adia Victoria writes a novel, I’m gonna read it. When she’s acting in a film, I’m going to watch it. She’s just that good.

Adia Victoria is about to finish up a short support tour for Silences, but I expect she’ll be back on the road soon enough, and on the festival circuit. Miss this truly great young artist at the beginning of her career and one day you will regret it.
 

“Different Kind of Love”
 
More Adia Victoria after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.15.2019
11:00 am
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‘A lover scorned, lovesick and obsessed’: Adia Victoria returns with the eerie ‘How It Feels’
04.24.2017
01:21 pm
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Has it really been a year since Beyond the Bloodhounds, the debut album by Adia Victoria was released?

Some of you may recall a post from last Spring where I raved about this album rather emphatically—describing its creator and her authentic 21st century take on the blues as “Jeffrey Lee Pierce reincarnated as Ronnie Spector”—and exhorting our readers to check out this fully-formed new artist while she was still touring in more intimate venues. I saw her perform at a poorly attended gig in a small rock club in Cincinnati, where despite the tiny crowd Adia Victoria and her band played a set that could’ve raised the roof off the place. It was a privilege to be there. If Beyond the Bloodhounds wasn’t the best album of 2016, well, there’s no doubt in my mind that it was, at the very least, the debut of the year, which is saying a lot. The CD hasn’t left my “speed rack” since the day I first got it. There’s not a single weak track on it.

All that and she seems like an extraordinarily literate, intellectually deep and self-aware human being. She’s as pretty as a princess, too.  Adia Victoria possesses the full toolkit to become an icon. Even at this early stage in her career, it’s not too soon to expect she’ll become one of “the greats.” I reckon she’s great already, now it’s up to the public to catch on.

After touring North America—including a stellar appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—and doing the festival circuit in Europe last year, she’s releasing a new EP—three covers (two written by Françoise Hardy and one by Serge Gainsbourg) and one original number, all sung in French—titled How It Feels.

“I wanted this EP to take on a more eerie feel. Instead of the imagined dream pop girl wishing for her man to come home I reimagined the lyrics as sung by a lover scorned but still love sick and obsessed. I wanted to keep the timeless feel of these songs while breathing into them a bit of modernity; sharpen the edges a bit. What if ‘Parlez Moi de Lui’ were more of a hazy, trip out love letter from a woman still haunted by lost love. What if her in deranged mind her man still danced in and out of sight, just out of touch? I wanted to inject ‘Laissez Tomber Les Filles’ with a bit of the anger and danger I felt as a new political era descended on our country. This session would prove to be therapeutic in channeling my frustration with the current political landscape into powerful songs sung by iconic, emotional women. This EP was a way express all these feelings in a tangible way. There is so much emotionality to women that is often policed. This project gave me the chance to shake off those restrictions, free myself from my own mother tongue and speak in universal themes that flow beyond the borders of language.”

Listen to How It Feels here. Adia Victoria will be touring America this summer as the opening act for Sturgill Simpson—what a double bill that is!—but alas every date on that tour is already sold out.
 

“You Know How It Feels,” a mini-documentary about Adia Victoria
 
More Adia Victoria after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.24.2017
01:21 pm
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Me & the Devil: Dig the authentic 21st century Southern Gothic blues howl of Adia Victoria
05.13.2016
11:23 am
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“I don’t know nothin’ about Southern belles/ But I can tell you something about Southern hell…”

Last month I idly read an article about a singer/guitarist named Adia Victoria in one of the free weeklies I’d picked up in a coffee shop. It seemed like her music might be worth following up on—the article made her look really intriguing—and so I tore the page out and put it in my pocket. Back home later that day I looked her up on the Internet and read this article and then this one while I listened to her music on Soundcloud and watched her read poetry and perform live on YouTube. Since then I’ve been pushing all of my rock snob friends to look out for Adia Victoria and as her debut album, Beyond the Bloodhounds, is out via today (via Atlantic Records subsidiary Canvasback Music) I think it’s high time for me to post about her here on Dangerous Minds. I’ve been chomping at the bit to write about Adia Victoria for weeks to be honest, but I wanted to wait until the record came out.

Adia Victoria’s gestalt can be summed up in a musical Venn diagram wherein PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple and Hank Williams meet Jack White, Chelsea Wolfe, St. Vincent, Gary Clark Jr. and Patti Smith. She’s an incredible guitarist. In her songwriting she has a remarkable talent for getting straight to the point. Her literate lyrics are sharply observed; direct yet intangible, so the listener can project themselves onto her poetry. (Neil Young is a master at this, obviously, and so is she.) I’ve read that she’s heavily influenced by blues singer Victoria Spivey—and Nirvana—and this makes sense.

Her blues is an authentic 21st century Southern gothic blues. Would you press play if I described Adia Victoria as “Jeffrey Lee Pierce reincarnated as Ronnie Spector”?

Well, you’d be a fucking idiot if you didn’t, wouldn’t you?
 

 
Listen to “Stuck in the South” first:
 

 
Much more Adia Victoria after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.13.2016
11:23 am
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