tella : Adagio (Loser Edition White Vinyl)

Borrowing its name, of course, from the term for music that’s meant to be played slowly, ‘Adagio’ is a pop record that feels like a very warm blanket, its nylon-string guitars and featherlight percussion swaddling its listeners for three minutes at a time. Written and recorded over the span of five years, with a consortium of international collaborators including !!!’s Rafael Cohen and British songwriter Gabriel Stebbing, Adagio is a 27-minute meditation on love and desire, rest and time. The album was produced by Stella and mixed by Edmund Irwin-Singer. Though the bulk of it is indeed sung in English, as all her records have been, ?tella also delivers her first two songs in Greek here – ‘Omorfo Mou’, the one that began on the boat, and a cover of a 1969 cult classic of the Greek New Wave, Litsa Sakellariou’s ‘Ta Vimata’. It is a sign of the self-assurance that radiates throughout these tender and smitten little tunes.

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