Ears Wide Open: Dol Ikara

Kevin Bronson on August 29th, 2019

0

Dol Ikara is the musical persona of L.A. native Claire Roddy, a singer-songwriter and poet, and the latest goth-rock siren to emerge from the underbelly of alternative music. Roddy, who studied music at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland (and is now tackling literature at UCLA), debuted last year with the single “White Queen” and last week released her debut EP, “Obsidian Ritual.”

If the name suggests some dark force of nature, Dol Ikara’s six-song EP seems to appear out of the mystic, too. It suggests PJ Harvey on a spirit quest, recalling Kendra Smith/Opal as well as contemporary artists such as Zola Jesus and Chelsea Wolfe. (Mazzy Star and Cocteau Twins are two of Roddy’s stated influences.)

Both Roddy’s artist name and much of her lyrical content derive from her fascination with language — Dol Ikara is a neologism, a name of two made-up words based on what it suggests phonetically. Her lyrics seem to come from a place equally surreal: “A subtle kind, gone divine, drawn aside / Gazed inside, paled the skies, a soft abide / Silver moon shines the loom of the day / Lights the lune from inside, inside of you,” she sings on “Black Flowers.”

The EP was made with producer Nic Capelle at L.A.’s Rockton Road Studios and mixed by Capelle and Michael Patterson (Beck, BRMC, She Wants Revenge, Trent Reznor).

Roddy says the creation of the EP “was ritualistic in every sense of the word … gaining control after acknowledging some unstable years.

“The ritual unfolded in real time; I didn’t know which songs were going to be included and which weren’t until I sat down with them for extended periods of time and made sense of them,” she explains. “I noticed the binaries of light and dark, coherence and incoherency tugging at each other — specifically in these six — which seemed most honest. As for the order, I arranged the selected songs to hint at the stages of grief. Clarity arises as the procession progresses.”

||| Stream: “Black Flower” and “Bon Road”