Listen: Thelma - "Take Me to Orlando"

photo by Grace Pendleton

Though I was introduced to her both in name and moniker at Waking Windows Portland 2017, it wasn't until almost a year later when she appeared as one of the openers  at the Brooklyn date of Molly Drag's Thumper album release tour that I was actually able to experience the bold, idiosyncratic stylings of Thelma's Natasha Jacobs. Immediately I was reminded of Regina Spektor and Fiona Apple, not necessarily because Jacobs has sought to sound like them but because of the particular way Jacobs ensures her vocals are indelible piece of her songs' multitudinous layers and exploratory timbres. "Take Me to Orlando", the first single from her upcoming sophomore album The Only Thing, is an excellent introduction to Jacobs' impressive vocal control as she performs flutters, leaps, shrieks, and squeaks. Jacobs employs the full range of her voice - switching between a coquette-ish whisper and a fuller voice - even if Jacobs never entirely changes registers. It's simultaneous furtive and confident - the sort of playful seduction employed when you're already attached.
Inspired by Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Jacobs' wrote "Take Me to Orlando" with both her own isolation and imagination in mind as she recovered from thyroid cancer and managed the chronic pain of her Ehlers-Danos syndrome, Jacobs writes and sings to an imaginary lover, her very own Orlando. Jacobs' plays with a theatrical sense of grandeur, aided in part by the inclusion of a string section, as she imagines a relationships build on mutual trust and understanding, pure in its illusion but aware of its design. Jacobs is able to conjure up an incredibly engaging dream world with surprisingly little effort - and not entirely exhausting a hell of a lot of her vocabulary to do so. Instead doing so through composition and omission. The core of "Take Me to Orlando" is not any of the details like how or why but instead just the feeling of wholeness and wholesomeness Jacobs' effortlessly portrays.



Thelma's sophomore album The Only Thing is out February 22nd. You can pre-order it through her Bandcamp here.