Words by Jason Lee; Cover photo by Logan White
Seems to us if there’s one thing we could all use right now it’d be a big hypodermic needle full of pharmaceutical-grade, undiluted magick as in “fish-scale” level purity (shoutout to Ghostface Killah!) stabbed thru our collective sternums, Uma Thurman-style, directly into the thoracic cavity thus jump starting our collective hearts battered of late by a spate of non-magical bummers like, um, war, rampant hate and cruelty, corruption and incompetence and masked men abducting and imprisoning people with impunity when not simply brutalizing them in the streets or worse like are you f***ing kidding me right now (!?) and whatever other things may be getting you down lately so thank goodness for Bella Litsa‘s new album…
…and when we say magick we’re not just talkin’ about cheap parlor tricks either tho’ there’s nothing wrong with that, but rather real-deal magick ending in a double hard-consonant, less about pulling rabbits out of hats (tho’ bunnies are totems of fertility) so much as occultist rituals intended to bend one’s outer reality to one’s inner will thru the power of what’s called Thelemic Practice which even tho’ it was first invented by Aleister Crowley doesn’t mean you gotta be a practicing Satanist prone to dancing nude under the blood moon covered in pig’s blood to put it into practice (do what thou will!)…
…tho’ it helps to have certain ritualistic tools on hand for Thelemic Practice which some associate with paganism or the dark arts more generally but again doesn’t mean you have to like yr basic wand, dagger, or amulet plus don’t forget to bring a good spell-casting tome from home and to rent a room full of black candles if possible with black crows or heck why not even white-winged doves fluttering about just to set the proper mood and most of all charm bags, lots of charm bags stuffed full of herbs, natural oils ’n’ essences, energy-channeling crystals and of course curative powders just make sure to stir the whole mixture up in the proper direction so its alchemical powers manifest as intended…
photos lifted from Bella Litsa’s IG
“It is important when blending herbs for charm bags, to stir in your intent (clockwise if this is a bag to attract something, and counter-clockwise if this is a bag to reflect, or banish) And take your time and as you blend, visualise the outcome you desire, and give thanks for it.” —witchcasket.com
“Passion Plug” discussed here in previous Deli piece; video credits here
…but here’s the deal, a money–and–time–saving deal at that, and that’s that you don’t really need any of the accoutrement listed above when you can just put on Bella Litsa’s new album Drasticism instead (drastic times require drastic measures!) whereupon you’ll almost immediately sense what a strong magickal essence the album emits, its songs the sonic equivalents of amethyst, jasmine, saffron, cedarwood, amber, moss, and sweet almond that when brought into proximity act as a potent catalyst for manifesting new realities cuz clearly the goddess was listening when Bella reached out a few years back on her early single, “And Soon, Venus Will Caress You Too” with the humble request, “I want to know all the secrets in the universe / I want them whispered to me in a dream” to which Venus immediately acceded…
…’cept instead of amethyst etc. the ingredients in these musical charm bags are more along the lines of Jane Birkin, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Lana Del Ray, Caroline Polachek, Solange, Sampa the Great, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Julia Holter, and/or Crystal Gayle (we made up this list btw w/some endorsed by B.L. on the record) the latter of whom not only for her famously floor-length raven hair (ooh, witchy!) but even more for records like 1977’s We Must Believe In Magic tho’ when it comes to musical influences a good publicist would likely opt for something a little punchier along the lines of “Bella Litsa is the punk rock Enya” which isn’t so far off either wut with B.L.’s trilling voice pushed to ever greater extremes esp. in her swan-like falsetto and ditto the music even if it’s “extremes” are of extreme dreaminess (still extreme!) but w/plenty of Sturm und Drang in there too in support of lyrical sentiments like “No one’s asking me to do this…engine, rev it up…it’s the only way I know how” which could just as easily be lines written by Joan Jett or Hayley Williams…
…none of which Is meant to imply Drasticism is derivative or anywhere near it cuz Bella very much cultivates and manifests her own musical universe across the its eleven tracks but still it’s an alchemical thing just like practically all music, like on track one, “Saint Mishima,” which begins in medias res fading in on a sibilant splash of cymbals as B. calmly informs the listener, “I’ve seen his hand turn into a serpent […] I’ve felt the arrows in my side […] I’m hung up like Saint Mishima” in reference to the multiple-times-nominated-for-the-Nobel-Prize-in-Literature Japanese writer, actor, playwright, bodybuilder and model Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) whose work was noted for its LGBQT+ undercurrents and for depicting “the unity of beauty, eroticism and death” (oh that!) and who at age 45 instigated a failed coup against the government which ended in his own ritual suicide a.k.a. seppaku…
…an artist inspired in no small part by his lifelong fascination with Catholic martyr Saint Sebastian and the endless array of representations, paintings and sculptures most especially, of the Adonis-like young man pierced by multiple arrows standing erect, their tips buried in the flesh of his naked torso, his body prone, arms aloft and sometimes bound in a pose of erotic supplication, and surrender to death in a single gesture, thus blurring the line between “le petit muerte” and “le grande muerte” as expressed in Saint Sebastian’s upturned face, anguished and rapturous, an icon of gay goth long before bands like Gene Loves Jezebel existed by we digress…
…all set against gently pulsating rhythms, hovering synths, and a Herbie Flowers-esque bass line with some faint wind chimes in there too tho’ within a minute the tension get ratcheted up ever so slightly (better get used to it tho’ not normally so slightly!) with a shift into waltz-time piano arpeggiations intertwined with plucked pizzicato strings (“September, my sedative / lay me down like you do / and turn it all blue”) before at last going full-on weak in the knees with heart-clutching drasticism (such a useful neologism!) just past the three-minute mark and here as elsewhere as logic subsides the lyrics get super repetitive or go fully non-verbal (a bit of both here) as pure emotional sensation takes hold over the senses…
…the music quivering with rhythmic and dynamic intensity (hello, destabilizing tonal chromaticism!) until it crashes out into the coda’s haze of sonic afterglow (“I only cared about you / and the music that we sing”), and while each song on the record follows its own oft-unpredictable trajectory, the tendency of B. Litsa and her band to ascend into the thin upper atmosphere with ethereal swells and extreme falsetto one minute and to plunge you into a deep, murky sea of tranquility with waves of submerged tension forming a dark undertow the next isn’t so much a bug as a feature, with the common ground being there’s no solid ground under your feet in either scenario which is why we recommend this album mostly to Air and Water signs…
…or take the next track, “1117” which at first we took to be the average number of sighs of pensive, poignant yearning elicited over the span of its duration (“I’m living for my longing / longing to live like real people do”) but which instead is named for the date Bella began work on the song (11/17) which in a way is reassuringly mundane for a song that’s anything but, with cascading piano lines like trails of tears trickling down tho’ before long it’ll have you drunk on its own unabashed, rapturous beauty (bella, bella! 🤌) infused with a tincture of melancholy and foreboding (“who will forgive you on your deathbed? / who will forgive you through your last breath?”) which if yr not built for it could be nearly maddening if it weren’t so utterly transfixing at the same time…
…or maybe that only makes the song more maddening [editor’s note: then why do we keep hitting repeat on it then!?] fittingly so for a song described by B.L. as “an emotionally unstable song as in I’m fighting with myself and trying to figure out what it is I want and why I want it to begin with” (sounds like a little Thelemic Practice may be called for!) with Bella’s voice a veritable master class in virtuosic, rapid fluctuations of vocal register between head voice and chest voice and back again kinda like a sung version of guitar hammer-ons and pull-offs if that makes any sense which results in a kind of yodeling effect but way more elegant than that, more like the sound of a teardrop permanently lodged in the singer’s throat…
L: on video shoot with director Dylan Gee; R: photo by Logan White
…and that’s only the first two songs but trust us there’s dozens more moments on Drasticism of magickal transitions and manifestations of drastical emotional states you didn’t even known existed like the way “The Fall” falls into an operatic interlude at 2:57 towards the end of an otherwise glam-rockish ballad so it works or the ephemeral-to-grandiose shift in “Inside a Seashell” at 1:37 with some unanticipated T-Pain style autotune tacked on at near its conclusion which carries over into the next track “My Blue Eyes” which itself incorporates some emerging-out-of-nowhere stacked harmonies at 1:30 and a sharp left-turn into an electric groove at 2:10 (“I’m drastic / I’m magick!”) before imploding into an attenuated bomb-shelter coda thusly, perhaps, making it the album’s twistiest song thus far even if far from its longest which is saying something…
…not to mention twisty-in-a-different-way songs like “Never Ending Movie” getting meta about Drasticism‘s theatricalized dramatics, a sure #1 hit if covered by ABBA decades ago (on par with the hyper-drasticism of “The Winner Takes It All”) if only we had a time machine handy, esp. in its modulated chorus with its soaring, stacked vocals and “ba-dum, ba-dum” piano fanfares and lines like “if you weren’t dead I’d be your groupie” and “all the girls be like ‘who’s he’?!’” which like many of the Swedish group’s biggest hits appears to harbor a desire for self-annihilation and along these same lines we recommend a listen to the six-plus minute “Tied Together By A Silver Thread” which is likewise highly cinematic, a stone’s throw from “sliver screen” in its title, with “Tied” sounding like it’d slot perfectly into an Ennio Morricone-scored spaghetti western (over the closing credits!) or as the love theme inna ‘70s-style Italian giallo ghost-arranged by Jean-Claude Vannier…
…and finally we should offer a disclaimer that if yr emotionally stunted or your soul is frozen you may be best off skipping this record cuz it’s overall drasticism could reawaken parts of your core essence long left for dead, including suppressed memories and repressed emotions, long ago filed away in the dead letter office of yr subconscious meant never to be dredged up again (speaking hypothetically!) or worse yet yr soul could be reanimated (halfway unfrozen, even!) thus leading to all sorts of impractical hopes and dreams and then yr really sunk which come to think of it this record should really come with a warning sticker but then again there could be a payday in it cuz now that the US government can be held liable for leading the way in melting the polar ice caps then maybe you’ve got a good case suing Bella Litsa for even partially re-vivifying yr soul or yr psyche and all the resulting collateral damage so if you choose to listen take it with a grain of drasticism…