Canadian singer-songwriter Michelle Gurevich, with the former stage name Chinawoman, combines humor with black realism in songs that place her in a musical landscape between slowcore and lo-fi pop.
Michelle Gurevich’s 6th album, Ecstasy in the Shadow of Ecstasy, finds new opportunities for rawness and vulnerability in a collection of songs about desire without end. The recurring themes are elation sought and remembered, the art and taste for living, romantic friends until the end, and roads not taken. Decadent, dramatic and earnest, vintage keyboards and synth strings offer the solitary rendition of a grand experience, and a voice always upfront delivers motifs familiar yet impossible to pinpoint from the great soup of European chanson.
Maneuvering between grandiose retro motifs and a surprising sincerity, Michelle Gurevich’s songs are tragicomic, melody-driven, sentimental and suspended in shadowy glamour. She combines humour with dark realism in smoky and intimate ballads delivered with cutting and fatalistic lyrics.
