Recently, a friend passed along the Tumblr for one Nicole Dollanganger, a little-known singer-songwriter from Ontario, Canada who's spent the past three years quietly uploading one quirky self-release after the next. She's got a voice so angelic-sounding that it's almost disturbing, a seeming fascination with dolls (and doll parts), and lyrics that flit ominously between childlike innocence, violence, and obsessive love.
"Rampage," a track from this month's Observatory Mansions upload, sounds like an airy little lullaby at first, but listen closely, and things take a turn for the twisted: Yeah, my baby has a baby, but it's not me/ It's an AK47 semi-automatic gun/ And he loves her more than he loves me. Taken together with a 2013 collection of Marilyn Manson covers named after the site of a famous high school massacre, Observatory Mansions plays out like a hair-raising dive into the darker, unspeakable considers of the American subconscious—not unlike the music of Lana Del Rey, sometimes. Not sure what to make of it all just yet, but you can dive into the magnetic, seasick universe of Nicole Dollanganger here.
Photo credit: Nicole Dollanganger's Tumblr.
