Nicole Atkins -
"Carouselle" is one the heartbreakingly beautiful songs on Nicole Atkins EP Bleeding Diamonds, out now on Columbia Records.
The sound of Nicole Atkins’ Bleeding Diamonds EP, which serves as a handy introduction to her upcoming, feature-length Columbia Records debut, is like the opening scene to one of her favorite directors David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Underneath the sunny blue skies, immaculately manicured suburban homes and their bright green lawns lies a forbidding black hole of danger, violence and death.
That is the world described by this 27-year-old singer/songwriter from Neptune, a New Jersey shore town just down the coastline from Asbury Park, where she grew up in an idyllic childhood, teaching herself to play a Grateful Dead song on the guitar she found in the attic once owned by an uncle who died when he was 13. Her father turned her on to blues artists like Jimmy Reed, allowing Nicole to sit in on sessions with local musician friends. She played for three years with the North Carolina alt-country band Los Parasols before making a name for herself as a solo performer on New York City’s anti-folk scene.
Earlier this year, Atkins was named one of Rolling Stone’s Top 10 Artists to Watch, raving about her “big voice full of longing and Loretta Lynn elegance, and slightly surreal folk-pop songs that evoke moonlit walks with the shadows closing in.”
Think Roy Orbison’s “Cryin’” if he was a woman, the orchestral sweep of Sufjan Stevens, the bleak vision of Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, the darkly mysterious girl group-on-acid musings of Julee Cruise and Lynch composer Angelo Badalamenti, the sorrow of Patsy Cline, the ‘60s psychedelia of Love and Nuggets, all with a redeeming sense of hope amidst the emotional wreckage…
Nicole Atkins "Carouselle"
MP3
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