There is a specific weight to Chellcy Reitsma’s “Carpe Diem,” one that feels less like a motivational poster and more like a heavy coin you’ve carried in your pocket for years, its edges worn smooth by worry. It announces its intention with a title we think we know, a bright promise of seizing the day, but the music itself doesn’t offer easy platitudes. Instead, it seems to suggest that to truly seize the day, you must first wrestle it into submission.
The album opens on the dark side of the moon. Here, love is dissected under a cold light in “Chemicals,” a fantastic and brutal reduction of passion to pure biology. It’s set in a dreamscape but ends in a laboratory. That dizzying cynicism is followed by the glittery loneliness of “Happy New Year,” a song that understands the unique hollowness of being miserable at a party. It’s the sonic equivalent of smiling for a photograph while actively dissociating. For a moment, listening to these initial tracks, I was reminded of the oddly sterile smell of old apothecary jars, neatly labeled remedies that promise a cure but hint at the bitterness within.
But this isn’t an album about sinking. It’s about the fight. A track like “Artists Plight,” though brief, is a coiled fist of a song, a manifesto scrawled on a cell wall. The turning point builds from there, in the escape narrative of “I Ran Away,” a recognition that self-preservation sometimes means burning the map of your own past. Here, Reitsma, along with Alan DeGabriele, Simon Cutajar, Edward Mifsud, and Adam Cutajar, crafts a soundscape that is part bruised Americana, part film noir alleyway, a place for bruised souls to heal and sharpen their claws.
And then, the album’s namesake arrives. “Carpe Diem” isn’t a gentle dawn; it’s a breaking and entering. The clever twist of being “carved by a DM” repositions the speaker not as someone passively taking what life offers, but as the master of their own game, rewriting the rules. This newfound authority bleeds into the snarling confidence of “Rock N Roll Lover” and finds its spiritual catharsis in “Rock N Roll Soul,” where music is the only dependable salvation. Yet, the ghost of what was lingers in the gorgeous sorrow of “Every time (Remastered),” a necessary ache that proves the heart, for all its new armor, can still feel the phantom limb of a lost connection.
“Carpe Diem” chronicles a soul’s hostile takeover of its own narrative. It’s a journey from disillusionment to a state of almost dangerous self-possession, peppered with remixes that feel like looking at old wounds through a new, sharper lens. The album is a messy, beautiful, and utterly defiant thing. It seizes the day not by waking up early and practicing gratitude, but by kicking the door down. It leaves you wondering one crucial thing: after you’ve successfully seized the day, who pays for breakfast?
