Album Review: Portrait Of My Heart by Spellling

Portrait of My Heart's opening, titular track is a symphonic lament soaked in the spindly shadow of late 70s goth rock, on which Chrystia Cabral expresses a purgatorial absence of belonging. The following tracks, Keep It Alive and Alibi, take from the seemingly discordant worlds of 80s hair metal/dad rock and Y2K Disney Channel pop-punk, combining them in a way that prods you between the eyebrows and demands you listen closely. Then there are songs like Ammunition - an opera-rock ballad complete with searing, baroque guitar lines - which blow your preconceptions of this historically oblique and witchy artist completely out of the water.

Full Review >>

Despite all the talk around how we live in a musical age defined by multi-faced genre smashing, the new sonic fusions arising in the internet-driven, everything-everywhere-all-the-time era are essentially never anointed names. The idea that a name like 'punk', which arose from decades of gradual socio-linguistic mutations, could ever be given to a genre or subculture again seems downright alien in 2025. The protean discography of SPELLLING (a solo project headed by Chrystia Cabral) is resoundingly of this genre-less era, however, her latest full-length 'Portrait Of My Heart' is almost her most surprising for the simple fact that it's, well, a straightforward alt rock album.

Full Review >>