Drum Media Review: Ophelia of the Spirits EP

July 2nd, 2008 | By Ophelia

By Michael Smith:

1 July 2008: Issue 912

Here’s a piano-playing female singer/songwriter who hasn’t resorted to the contemporary penchant for emphasising her Australian accent, yet isn’t singing with an American accent. Her limpid vocal delivery is studied and articulate, often haunting, even as her accompanists on a track like ‘Nothingness’ hurtle into chaos. There are hints of Enya & Loreena McKennitt, even Maggie Reilly circa Mike Oldfield’s ‘Moonlight Shadow’, without being twee or cloying. Rather, there’s a certain elegiac quality that invariably recalls her Shakespearian namesake. All very pre-Raphaelite really, in an impressionistic musical way.