12 May 2024 // A review by Maggie Cocco
Samantha Josephine is an artist for true lovers of the lo-fi, bedroom mumbling, punk-inspired indie internet underground. The alternative singer-songwriter blends elements of punk and rock with phrases that rhyme and convey almost nothing concise and everything feeling. Bare textures of ostinato-like rhythms induce head nodding hypnosis interrupted by the occasional irregular beat or line of decipherable text. “There’s something in the meaning of it, meaning of the breath.” And as suggested the listener finds something raw and real to hold on to between the noise and the music.

Your Unbelievable Head, the name of both the title track and the album, is one of many pseudo salacious titles that pique interest and, like much of the album, call into question our relationship with and expectations of music and words. “In your mind, in the mains of it all, where it comes to be, where it comes to live, where it makes a meaning, and takes us in.” These lyrics from track number four, “Cool and Decided”, reflect an approach to music that allows Samantha Josephine to forsake the conventional and embrace the machinations of her musical mind, borrowing from a school of similarly inclined artists whose influence can be heard throughout. Flavors of Lou Reed, Courtney Barnett, Sonic Youth, and CAKE come to mind.

The album contains fourteen tracks, most of which are either standard length melodic, like Your Unbelievable Head, or short and stylized spoken word, like Cool and Decided. The Flower Scene, falls into the former category and conjures strong imagery, holding the listener in an imagined sensory place where “we’re gonna sit here and twirl our hair.” By contrast, songs that fall into the latter category, like You’re Bordering, contain pointed language, - “you’re so fucking shallow” - that eschew the senses in favour of a landscape of thought.

Not an album for the lover of commercial or conventional music, Samantha Josephine is making music for her soul, and if it speaks to you then welcome to the party. Of the album, she says it’s “a collection of songs from a piece of time in my life. Just some section of time sealed off from another. Some tracks I have left more rough than others. It just felt right that way. I battled myself over the order for quite some time, and whether to even release. But it's a pull inside that we all have that takes us in some direction and I have felt powerless to it, fear and shame or not. I felt more bold in what I would release with these, more bold in the songs I would allow through and the words that I would allow to be heard by others. Each track feels like a testament of truth to myself, some truth I can't understand, but something I have felt and known one way or another.”

Your Unbelievable Head is now streaming and available for purchase here.

Compared to Lou reed and Courtney Barnett, Samantha Josephine's unique sound has been assembling a group of fans from around the world to watch her perform from her living room. She has been called a style beast, with a voice, that historically speaking not a lot of females have.

Visit the muzic.net.nz Profile for Samantha Josephine

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