Heartdrag by Za Noon

I like to be sung a song and I like to be told a story and Za Noon is full of songs that are stories. Some run their fingers through your hair. Some jangle and jolt. Some rise up, thundering.

Heartdrag welcomes you into its space in an easy dressing gown that conceals a costume-box’s-worth of sonic sundresses, gogo boots, flak jackets, tutus, crocheted tops, zoot suits, and bell bottom jeans. This pageant of altered states, sleight-of-hand changes, and mercurial personas is powered by a versatility that is as effortless as it is virtuosic. Za Noon is a shapeshifter, and every time she lifts an arm, a world is revealed.

She unveils them one by one. Intimate whispers draw you in as baying proclamations give force to undulating rock tracks, while shimmering guitar punctuates with crunchy, punchy bass. Silky, smoky vocals invoke Cat Power. The sense they could go anywhere, but they’re being held here, for now, until the time is right to release. There’s a Chan Marshall tension in the guitar, too, gossamer-light, midnight-dark. Is it seductive? Is it menacing? Za Noon shuffles you through the haze in a slow-dance, when a loping drumbeat comes and she kind of kindly, kind of forcefully, drops you onto a shag rug, into slants of light—light that shifts, intermittently, from steady sunlight to a pulsing strobe.

As a child, I had a book of fairy tales with a story about a princess who had jewels and flowers fall from her mouth when she spoke. Za Noon has a princess-jewel-mouth mode, where her vocals take on a radiant, lolly-sweet purity; a pouring-out of aural diamonds and roses. She can make every note ring, clear and strong, Weyes-Blood-style, and send them soaring into a spacious, resonant grandeur. Then, with a puff of air, all is burny breath. My House sears with it, before rolling into a rollicking finish that feels like a PJ Harvey effort. Ghostly Twin Bed’s wandering tempo stumbles like a sleepwalker. Za Noon trills like a folksinger to a Breeders-style baseline in One Thing, and intones a sturdy, steady, weighted-but-oh-so-feather-light-weightlessness in Aloud, the closing track of this auditory procession.

Heartdrag never lets you listen lazily, never lets you define it, definitively. Over quiet, meandering guitar, sudden synths keen. At times, psychedelic fuzz crowds in where deep drums have turned your swoons to trembling. Beats skip, kick, pick up pace. You try to keep up, and when you can, the satisfaction is exquisite. You’re in concert. You’re in communion. But when the changes get the better of you, and you surrender to the drift, it will take you, in raptures, over some strange and holy swells.

By Genevieve Callaghan

jess zanoni