“Long Is The Tunnel” begins fully submerged. Rain is the first sound on the album’s opening track, “Challenger Deep,” the drops falling to announce the coming of a gentle fingerpicking. Next comes Beckerman’s voice, an understated captivation that stuns with its soft strength. She sings “Will you wait for me / Where there is no later on? / Will you wait for me at the end, the end?,” drawing out each word, pausing between phrases—her voice arriving wrapped in silk but sung with desperation. There is a heaviness to her vocal, something substantive to grasp onto despite her lilting melancholia. She reaches her hand up through the water’s surface, begging you to reach out and pull her from her drowning.
Standout track “Bouganvillea” showcases even more sonic experimentation and excitement, and Beckerman’s voice slides gracefully and meticulously up and down scales—as if with each new word and syllable, the apparition of her tone is dancing across the keys of a piano. There’s a palpable back-and-forth puppeteering on the song; even the lyrics speak to a confounding cascade of emotions and thoughts, as she sings “I do not want to keep you alive but I do not want you to die / Why are you mad at me when I didn’t try to help you out at all.” The track closes in on itself, Daneshevskaya’s paradox of love and longing.
Graceful violins underset the following “ROY G BIV,” as Beckerman sings optimistically of the world’s natural organization: “It’s all in rainbow order on the way down / It’s all in perfect order.” She had been inspired by her own dayjob (when she’s not singing, she’s a pre-school social worker in NYC), and claims to have been admittedly moved by how kids’ worlds “hinge upon small discrepancies.”
New York singer and songwriter Daneshevskaya shares their highly anticipated new release “Long Is The Tunnel“, now available to stream and purchase on “Blood Red” vinyl or cassette via Winspear or your local record store.
Deemed “dynamic, baroque indie rock” by DIY, the seven gleaming songs on “Long Is The Tunnel” each sound like a world within their own, pairing twisted-up classical structures with distinctive metaphors that are both otherworldly and grounding. Daneshevskaya was recently hailed as an Artist To Watch by Stereogum, citing her music as “iridescent and unforgettable,” and “Long Is The Tunnel” was dubbed Paste’s Album of the Week with an impressive 8.8 score.
Laced with distortion and supple synth notes, “Big Bird” aches through bursting percussion and Beckerman’s airy singing that thins out into a beautiful, angelic falsetto. “The biggest bird I’ve ever seen,” she intones. “I don’t know what the reason was. I can’t tell a dove from the biggest bird I’ve ever seen.” It’s an earworm melody that rises and falls and glitters, culminating in a field recording of birds flocking to some unknown destination. “Long Is The Tunnel” ends on a gentle, elusive and captivating note, as final track “Ice Pigeon” opens to twinkling piano keys—almost ironically so. It could soundtrack the opening to a music box of her own history but, firstly, it ties together the record’s surrealist charm—most emphatically when she sings “Everything that comes out of your mouth is gold / But it’s useless to me / Cause I know what it needs.”
from Daneshevskaya’s forthcoming project ‘Long Is The Tunnel’ out November 10th, 2023 via Winspear.
The Fat Angel Sings 