Noise Pop Festival: Carla Dal Forno

This is Carla dal Forno’s debut solo album, following time in cult Melbourne group Mole House and an earlier association with Blackest Ever Black as a member of Fingers and Tarcar. Her voice is an extraordinary instrument: both disarmingly conversational and glacially detached. It has something of the bedsit urbanity of Anna Domino, Marine Girls, Antena, or Helen Johnstone – stoned and deadpan – but it can also summon a gothic intensity that Nico or Kendra Smith would approve of. This voice is the perfect embodiment of dal Forno’s emotionally ambiguous songs: their lyrics rooted in the every day, observing and exposing a series of uncomfortable truths. This voice asks difficult questions of singer, subject, and sung-to.