Hold Time is Kyla Marlena’s debut album.
A classically trained cellist currently based in Toronto, Kyla has spent years collaborating/touring with fellow musicians including Jonah Yano and Eliza Niemi. It was during this time embedded within Toronto’s downtown music scene that Kyla brought together a formidable cast to produce Hold Time which features Ben Whitely (The Weather Station), Julian Psihoigos (Georgia Harmer, Katie Tupper), Felix Fox (BadBadNotGood, Jonah Yano), Jasper Smith (Benjamin Dakota Rogers), Karen Ng (The Weather Station) and Noah WIlliamson (Sonder).
The musical range displayed by this group is no better exemplified than on opening track 21 which employs a classic soft/loud dynamic, but as that big chorus hits Jasper Smith’s guitars and Psihoigos’ drumming stay tastefully raw, mirroring Kyla’s delivery as she invokes the on a jag spirit of PJ Harvey. Just as the listener feels like they have it all figured out the feral chorus gives way to Karen Ng’s cerebral saxophone providing a calm after the storm and a left turn to reset any expectations as to what may follow. What does follow are devastating observations about life, love and the self backgrounded by field recordings, feedback and a pervasive melancholic air.
While on the surface Hold Time belies Kyla’s classical background, if one listens closer it becomes apparent in the melodies and slow vibrato of Kyla’s vocals that her decades long experience of playing cello is omnipresent. It’s easy to reimagine the album’s songs as arrangements for cello as the primary voice and that ghostly influence/elegance is especially coded in the album’s softer side on Why Can’t I, Forever And Always and album closer 26. Whether softly-delivered poetry over skeletal arrangements or boldly-sung assertions of the tragedy of mortality over layers of distorted guitars, Kyla Marlena’s words speak both to the human experience and the forces of time.
Kyla expands:
"When I stepped back, I realized that beyond the relationships or experiences I speak to directly, the overarching theme I am always trying to reckon with is time. In the middle of a moment I often catch myself thinking, "How can I make myself remember the exact feelings and details of this instance?" and there’s something both heartbreaking and magical about facing the impossibility of that. I'm always trying to grab and pocket moments, which is obviously as futile as trying to hold running water. In a way, that is what this record attempts to do: to hold time while being aware that it can’t."
Devastating, nostalgic, graceful, raw, self-aware and self-deprecating Hold Time contains multitudes and in its impossible attempt to capture that which is ephemeral gifts us an undeniably mature portrait of an artist moving through time.
