Princess Diana of Wales - (2021) ST CS

 

A Colourful Storm – ACOLOUR038

A Colourful Storm presents an inquisitive, self-reflective album by Princess Diana of Wales, the label’s newest and most curiously cloaked project. Someone, no one, a notion, a feeling... while the moniker’s origin is ambiguous, its aspirations are not. Feeling closer, questioning intimacy. Longing and forgetting. Venting, validating. Emerging from the dark. What is real and how does it feel?

Diana offers clues but no simple answers. Vocal-led pieces ‘Still Beach’ and ‘Fragments of Blue’ are brittle and intoxicating, contemplating recklessness and unfulfillment of a past life: "Watching the future wash away / Giving it up to have this day". She studies closeness and, incredulous of the feelings that emerge, wonders if detachment is impermanent: "Can this always be how it feels? / Can this always be?". She catalogues these emotions as a series of memories, colours and images. ‘Evaporate’, sedated and hushed, is a secret confession and ode to resolution, albeit, fatally, only a temporary one: "Take some form / Later on when I can do this / When we can do this / Together".

Behind the album’s make-up is a stage of dubwise disorientations evoking in-between states of the everyday. ‘Swing’ and ‘Closer’ are woozy and dreamlike, their voices summoning ghosts of fortunes past while ‘Exhaust’ finds an aperture in our protagonist’s daydream-dérive. A perilous foreshadowing of the incantatory ‘Choir Chant’, whose spell pacifies her inquisition, submerging both self and feeling into the deep blue sea.

A swing in a park

A car on the street

Sitting on a beach

Standing on sleet

Fragments

Recollect

Reprocess

Refeel

Start, stop

Slide, slip

Vanish