SpudShow 418 - Little Invisibles

Music supplied via ArielPublicity

Artist - Little Invisibles

Track 1 - Breathless
Track 2 - Closer
Track 3 - What Once Was

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“I’ve always been drawn to the darker sides of art and music,” says Little Invisibles vocalist Gina Degnars. “Even back when I started taking piano lessons, when I was seven years old—I always wanted to play the minor chords, not the major ones. There’s a powerful beauty in darkness, I think.”

So there is, from Chopin to Poe to Twilight. And it’s that same dark, powerful beauty that resonates throughout Little Invisibles’ brand of hauntingly melodic alternative pop. With Gina’s aching voice and poignant keyboard at the fore, the band’s epic, sweeping songs rise and swell like waves on a moonlit shore until they crash over the listener like a sea of Byronic heartbreak. Five of these impossibly moving songs—all composed, like the rest of the group’s music, by Gina—make up Closer, Little Invisibles’ stunning debut.

A dramatic unveiling if ever there was, Closer, which Gina co-produced, is a veritable jewel box of wide-screen modern rock. Within: jaw-dropping riches like the opener, “Breathless,” all ghostly piano, soaring vocals, and danceable trip-hop beats; the wounded-but-defiant lament “What Once Was,” the EP’s only piano-less track; and “Headrush,” a sultry duet with co-composer Lance Davis that pulses with heart-beating rhythms and gothic (small g) melodrama.

If it all sounds a bit Jane Eyre, well, then why not? Gina, who’s been through the relationship mill as much as any mature artist, maintains that she’s merely allowing her romantic angst to flower into songs that are beautiful and, ultimately, redemptive and uplifting for those who hear them. “When I’m happy I never go to the piano to write,” says Gina, who holds a bachelor’s degree in piano performance and studied at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. “I write first and foremost from emotion, and after a breakup you never have to look far for inspiration. But even then there usually ends up being an element of hope in my songs.”