by David Wilikofsky
Chrystia Cabral, the mastermind behind SPELLLING, is responsible for some of the most transfixing music of the past few years. Her last album, 2019’s Mazy Fly, built up haunted, alien landscapes out of little more than her voice and icy synths. The followup to that album, The Turning Wheel, was originally intended for release in September 2020 but delayed due to COVID. It was worth the wait. Though some will consider this album a sonic departure from her previous work, to my ears it feels like the purest distillation of Cabral’s artistic vision to date.
The Turning Wheel was recorded with an ensemble of thirty one other musicians, and the scope and ambition of the album is evident from its first notes. Opener “Little Deer” begins with the sounds of cello and piano playing together. Instruments quickly collect. Other strings join in; we hear a chorus, a harp, chimes, brass, woodwinds, and before you know it what sounds like a whole orchestra is playing with Cabral’s vocals swooping above everything. The highly orchestrated composition is a far cry from her previous record and a harbinger of things to come. While some tracks do harken back to the minimalism her earlier work (“Boys At School”, “Queen of Wands”), as a whole this album represents a much more expansive sound for Cabral.
Lyrically Cabral leans into the mythical and fantastical elements of her music. We get tales of emperors, wizards and future worlds, their fantastical narratives matched by the music’s grandeur. Each song renders a world in miniature, whether it’s the haunted circus of “Magic Act”, the sci-fi tinged “Awaken” or the space age bounce of “The Future”. Perhaps because of its ambitious scope, the record often feels hard to pin down musically, but you can draw some comparisons to kindred spirits. There’s a bit of Kate Bush in the sweep of her vocals and some of the theatricality of Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, but my favorite songs are the ones that sound like only Cabral could have made them. “Queen of Wands” is a great example, a track opened by string quartet that leads into a throbbing synthscape. The moments where Cabral is able to effortlessly mesh her signature sounds with this new sonic palette are far and away the album’s most thrilling.
Part of the appeal of Cabral’s music (at least to me) has always been her ability to conjure up worlds with little more than synths and her voice. In that sense, The Turning Wheel seems like a risky proposition on paper; it’s maximalist pop in every sense of the world, a sixty minute album of expansive tracks that slowly build and develop. But perhaps counterintuitively, this sprawl has actually sharpened Cabral’s artistic focus: this is music about world building, pure and simple. There is so much sonic detail packed in every track that I’ve barely feel like I’ve scratched the surface, and I think that’s the intent. Adding all this instrumentation has simply allowed Cabral to render her worlds in more detail than ever before, and it’s a wonder to behold.