Nadja Zela - Greetings to Andromeda. Requiem

So this is a requiem.
Devastated by her husband’s sudden loss, struggling to recover both inspiration and her voice, the Swiss rocker found an echo in this particular musical form, made famous by Mozart, Brahms or Fauré. She went through all its codes and composed her own requiem matching one or 2 pieces to every liturgical movement of this Mass for the dead (introit, kyrie, gradual, tract, dies iræ, etc)
But her requiem is free from classicism and from any religious connotation. She speaks to everybody actually. And indeed, when you listen, you share her sorrow... and even more.

You can’t say requiem without saying sadness. So it deals with a mass of sad songs, heightened by the choir, and with a climate sometimes heavy sometimes aerial, or even both in the same time.
Therefore the snoring harmonium is central, right from the start: "Andromeda" serves as an intro.
Then "Sun God", which reminds me of Villeneuve ("Does Anybody Hear Now?"), sends you into space. You encounter cosmos again in other tracks ("Big Black Holes", "Space Invader").
All isn’t slow and sad, far from it. The rhythms and percussions, magnificently performed, get back on top at the right times, like the smashing instrumental "Fanfare" or an "Endless Sleep" of which the “mother mother” recalls Gotye to my mind ("Smoke and Mirrors")

There’s also, and especially, "Brickman". I don’t the hell know what she does in the kitchen in the buff with the fridge open, but good grief how good this song is! Astoundingly creative from the intro with this sound evoking a telephone ringing to a brick wall. Nobody answers. Necessarily. And you can imagine yourself transformed into a ‘brickman’, moving soulless and only out of habit into a now empty everyday life.

You may notice a floydish "Wanna Be With You", insistently repeated: I wanna be with you. You can only understand.
This album is floydish too with its (relatively) experimental side: use of a Moog, of a stylophone, of a noise box. But the one who got herself known thanks to the female band Rosebud had the intelligence of a right distribution between electronic instruments and analogical instruments. Winning combination.
    
The lyrics are in English, except 3 of them: two in Swiss-German ("All", "Au Nümm Da"), and one in French ("La Poupée").

And the opus logically concludes with an envoi ("Travel With Starlight"), “the end is a beginning”, since this is a requiem.