Simona-Valentina’s new album, “Mirrors & Feathers,” arrived much like an unexpected guest at a tea party – one who’s been through a rather significant ordeal but still manages a fascinating, slightly skewed smile. This London-based songwriter, with roots trailing back to Transylvania, offers a collection that feels less like a polished performance and more like eavesdropping on intensely private, courageous conversations, rendered in dreamy, enchanting strokes.
The “mirrors” here are unflinching. They reflect not just the artist’s inner landscape – a terrain of emotional wounds, past hurts, and the sort of fears that cling like damp silk – but also our own, if we dare to look. There’s a peculiar ache in these confessions of love, lust, happiness, and pain; a rawness that makes you want to both lean in and, occasionally, look away, as if witnessing a rare, fragile bloom that might break if you breathe too hard. It’s the sound of someone desperately wanting to trust, to connect, yet constantly bumping against their own barbed wire fences, erected long ago out of self-preservation. This music understands that sometimes reaching out for comfort feels like reaching for a hot coal, and pushing away is a well-worn reflex.
Then there are the “feathers,” representing a yearning for self-liberation so palpable it almost flutters. It’s not a bombastic cry for freedom, but more like the determined, if sometimes terrifying, effort to unlearn old pains, to thaw. The 70s and 90s baroque pop-folk sensibilities Simona-Valentina weaves in create a soundscape that’s both antique and current; imagine an ornate harpsichord discovered in a dusty attic suddenly playing a tune that perfectly understands your iPhone anxieties. There’s a weariness, yes, the kind that settles deep in the bones from carrying unseen burdens for too long, but also a resilient, flickering hope, a fragile tenacity. It’s the sound of someone tired of the cycles of suffering, yet not quite ready to extinguish that final, brave spark that yearns for peace.
This isn’t music for easy listening, not entirely. It’s for those moments when you need unvarnished honesty over superficial reassurances. It asks for genuine witnessing. “Mirrors & Feathers” doesn’t offer neat solutions to the agonizing journey of wrestling with internal demons, but it does hold a space for the complex, often excruciating, dance of healing and self-acceptance. After it all, one might wonder: can true flight ever begin before we fully acknowledge the weight of what’s been holding us down?
