It surprised me to discover there are three Evaristes, one of them a French pop idol from the 1960s whose songs are still available on good old Spotify. ‘Good old’?? you may ask. Well yes, because without it and other streaming services I would never have gotten to hear this debut single by Denmark’s Evariste. It does have some uses.
Ghosts in songs resonate with me. My favourite song has ghost in the title and I’ve always been enamoured with Anna Calvi’s take on Suicide’s ‘Ghost Rider’; there are classy ghost songs by Halsey and Alan Walker and they total over 60.
So I was always going to be attracted to newcomer Evariste’s take on the subject in ‘Ghost Story (Run)’.
She’s based in Elsinore. Wasn’t that the location of Hamlet’s castle? And didn’t he see the ghost of his father there? Was any of that of inspiration to Evariste? We’ll probably never know.
What I can say for sure is that the song is a five minute tour de force, a musical kaleidoscope that embraces numerous ‘genres’ and styles such as laid back smoky jazz club, death pop, sympathetic balladry, Nordic melancholy, layered vocal arrangements, discordant chords and avant garde pop, the latter including simple piano notes of the sort that told you someone was about to be viciously murdered in a Scandi noir TV cop drama.
She doesn’t so much mix these styles as try to define a whole new one, like she’s been given a hundred musical Lego blocks to play with. Not surprising really. She grew up listening to many varieties of music from classical to jazz to church vocal to klezmer (Central and East European party music, structured around communal folk dancing).
Lyrically, the song concerns the quiet realisation that a relationship has come to an end. The narrator tries to let go of a partner who has already moved on, while looking back on the illusions and hopes that once accompanied their love.
There are thousands of songs with the same premise but few with such evocative lines as
“Treasonous hopes
Reasonless cloaks
Silences we thought and spoke
Fountains of lust
Mountains of trust
Crumbling under one of us.”
Possibly a little too deep for mainstream tastes ‘Ghost Story (Run)’ will undoubtedly find favour with the cognoscenti of Copenhagen, Aarhus and beyond.
The single was recorded and produced by David Elberling and is the first introduction to Evariste’s forthcoming EP, ‘Sunk Lust Fallacy’, which sounds like a metal title. What will she come up with next?
Find her on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/komponistevariste/
