Let’s pretend we don’t know who’s hiding behind Σtella. Then “Nomad” sounds as if Sade had stumbled across a couple of US hippies in a Greek tavern who have been living in a cave on the beach since the early seventies. In fact, Σtella Chronopoulou succeeds with great elegance in merging traditional harmonies of her native Greece and the pop music from her parents’ record cabinet with Anglo-American pop conventions.
? Buy UP AND AWAY at Amazon.de
For UP AND AWAY, her debut for SubPop, she shelved the electro-pop beats of her previous releases, perhaps out of respect for the label’s grunge past. The classic band line-up is expanded with bouzouki and the kanun, an oriental zither, and you could actually dance a sirtaki to “Who Cares”.
“The Truth Is”, on the other hand, takes a leisurely stroll down Sunset Boulevard, “Black And White” follows in the footsteps of Fleetwood Mac and Σtella sings with the slightly sleepy grandeur of a Hope Sandoval, so that one quickly forgets all holiday clichés, the supposed incompatibility of opposites accepted and found that a new genre was born as a matter of course that one would no longer want to be without: Greek West Coast pop.
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