Like her peers, Alexis Castrogiovanni seeks to move outwith the limitations of her education. A classically trained cellist, the Montreal musician spent the four years since the end of her formal training teaching herself to branch out in different directions. She taught herself songwriting so as to find an outlet for her different musical desires and her poetic edge. Her debut EP, Someday My Thoughts Will Be Like a Range of Mountains, speaks to a hopeful future: on the four tracks she starts the work creating the landscape she hopes for in the title.
The tracks on Someday come in two forms. The first are punchy “emotional hairballs” that layer on a slew of additional instruments. Driven by Castrogiovanni’s plucked cello, she lurks and creeps with a shadowy and pungent disposition on “Ex-Girl”. “Ex girlfriends are a particular breed of ghost / she walks unbidden through your memories / and leaves her perfume in the bottles of other women,” she intonates like she is the very character, gliding between rooms and haunting everyday lives. When a brazen flurry of baritone saxophones and strings swirl together for the chorus, the effect is like Castrogiovanni has summoned a typhoon around her, unleashing some godly power.
Briefer still than “Ex-Girl”’s two and half minutes runtime, “A Certain Point” fizzles rigid staccato strings with swelling dissonance and engulfing synths. Evoking Mitski’s more discordant moments, the final crescendo of noise would capture the attention of anyone listening (before it promptly disappears), but much like “Ex-Girl” there is a certain feeling that something is missing, be it a bridge, a verse, or even more of a descent into cacophonous discord. Snappy pieces of heightened emotion and adoration though these tracks are a puzzle piece feels absent, like it’s only part of the full picture.
The other form of track is the surrounding two songs where Castrogiovanni spreads herself out with much more space. Contemplative and airy, she allows the music to ebb and flow. The title track has her cello sounding almost crystalline as she layers the strings and the saxophone harmonizes alongside it. Final track “To Catch A Feeling” takes up even more space, and strips away more layers. A languorous bass line bobs along before surges of drums and harp lift the track. There’s an echo of Laurie Anderson lingering between the notes, and one is even left wondering if Castrogiovanni couldn’t have immersed herself deeper in the track, exploring the stilling quietude of moments around the song itself.
As a first step in Castrogiovanni’s solo career outside the classical realm, Someday lays down some good stepping stones of the next place. It would be great to hear musical moments that explore the tempos and space between the frenetic shorter tracks and the extended slower ones, and also instances that play even more with the studio and textures. These are future ventures to consider and hope for though, when Castrogiovanni’s thoughts truly are a range of mountains. Right now they feel more like molehills, but for some that’s enough topography to be doing with.
