White Poppy w/ Tooth Decay at Heimathafen / Wednesday, 16.03.2016

Crystal Dorval has been making healing, distorted rug-gaze music as White Poppy from a coastal mindset all her own since 2011. The project has become a candid culmination of Crystal’s DIY experiments, and a vessel for constant introspection. Her music lands on a liminal space between pop perfection and enveloping drone. White Poppy is drug music made by someone who doesn’t take drugs.

White Poppy is from Vancouver. The term Poppy does not designate the genre of the band, and there is nothing “flowery” about the sound of the band. More fitting descriptors are shoegaze, ethereal and dream. Crystal Dorval is the face of White Poppy.

The sound may be the definition of “sweet surrender.” It beautifully embodies all of the dreamiest, fuzziest, and gaziest sounds of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It also rings of the postmodern paranoia of Post-Punk. It’s unquestionably haunting, but also works as a hypnotic sedative, as if you were facing the Apocalypse on all of the right drugs…

Natural Phenomena is her second album, and it echoes 2013’s previous self-titled effort in its isolationist origins, as the record emerged slowly across a 9-month retreat alone on a farm on Vancouver Island: “Some days I would only add one tiny guitar line or keyboard texture and that would be it for the day… it was a long process.” However grueling and gradual the method, what accrued is gold – 10 of Dorval’s deepest dreamdives, starry ambient pools, and dissolved guitar designs, ghosted through a lens of grey-skied pop.

Songs wax and wane across faded rainbows of guitar, sunrise keyboards, looped percussion, and vocal ocean-spray. Behind Dorval’s gauze of warm noise glows something pure and newer than new age: “My hope is that these positive feelings will be communicated sonically, or in essence, and will be enriching for listeners.” A high height for a climbing talent; White Poppy blooms on cliffs of light.