I don’t know about you, but sometimes I think it’s kind of fun to be sad. You get to mope around enjoy the serendipitous timing of rainstorms, all the while sipping on a generous dose of self-pity. Based off of His Young Heart, I think the members of Daughter would agree with me. With this EP, Elena Tonra and Igor Haefeli provide four songs ready and willing to indulge listeners in the whole-hearted, melodramatic, soul-searching kind of mood that can be so very delicious to the tortured soul (or the wanna-be tortured soul — whatever you want).
Elena Tonra, originally a solo acoustic act, was well served to invite her electronic-inspired boyfriend into her musical sphere. The collaboration between Tonra’s acoustic background and Haefeli’s layers of electronic keyboard produces one fine brooding experiment. I haven’t quite decided yet whether Tonra’s lyrics actually are poetry or merely trying to be, but either way there’s something about them that stays with you. In “Landfill,” the refrain line of “I want you so much / but I hate your guts” was enough to give me goose bumps the first time I heard it.
Daughter’s music sneakily sits on the line of a little too self-flagelletory, but I would imagine this is more a matter of mood and general disposition than anything else. On an anecdotal note, my roommate described the EP as “Florence on downers.” While it’s true there exists the same atmospheric quality that is the signature of Florence and the Machine, Daughter is just a bit more low-key and arguably heart-felt. At any rate, with both His Young Heart and this spring’s The Wild Youth, Daughter doesn’t seem to be a project that will be losing steam anytime soon. Nor should they — everyone needs a song to cry to every once in a while.