Lord Kesseli - Tell Me When You're Empty

This is no real new album. No real best of album, no real live album, no real unplugged album. It’s much more than that!
What’s the principle? One room. One voice. One grand piano. No audience, Covid dictates, but a live broadcast on Radio Stadtfilter in Winterthur. A few joss sticks. And that’s all.

That’s all? No! For there are the songs of “Lord Kesseli” – an appropriate reduction of its full formulation “Lord Kesseli and the Drums”.
5 old songs out of 8. The piano-voice filter gives his pop music ("Popsong") a new light (or a new darkness!): the intimacy of the voice, the striking contrast between brushed piano and hammered piano, that each note grasps you ("Meteors Hitting the Earth"). The transformation works perfectly, playing exactly on the same strings that made the success of Sheller en Solitaire. And makes me re-like the piano.

Majestic, sensitive, deep, the result is a classical work, meditation, communion. However, his lyrics don’t seem to be very orthodox ("MDMA").
Here I must make a digression. Because of this repetitive fascinating track, but overtly drug oriented, I almost gave up on publishing this review. Then I thought to myself there were already drug addicts in my CD collection, sometimes unbeknownst to me. In this subject, my firm conviction is the following. An artist who absolutely needs some drug to create, who is unable to produce anything without being in an artificial trance... is no genuine artist. I want to proclaim this doctrine, and I want to believe this is not the case of our bearded man. End of the digression.

For Dominik Kesseli, who chose "Lord" – because it sounds better that "Princess", he says – also displays an austere ecclesiastic look, adjusted to an odd universe. And a beautiful voice, pronouncing s like sh a little, like Max Usata (Puts Marie).

"Tell Me When You're Empty", the title-track, previously unreleased, has a strange construction: whereas it starts with the chorus, the verse seems to go into a quite different musical direction... before falling again miraculously on the chorus!

What about the lyrics? "Hail to the Economy" seems to deplore a world where "economy" mostly rhymes with "slavery". Icy fire.

All this is dark. Clearly. There’s dream, there’s sorrow, there’s love, there’s death... And much more than that.