A classic forty-minute set of inquisitive pop songs, blessed with a lightness of touch and a sharp focus that can’t help but charm the listener. Angel Deradoorian wants her process to feel immediate, but unlike the meditative and jammy “Find the Sun, Ready for Heaven” took time. The singer-songwriter started writing music for the record by herself in a really small, uninhabited town in upstate New York, but ended up reworking and editing it tirelessly across various stages. In their recorded form, the songs remain fluid and kinetic while carrying a blazing, prickly intensity all the way through. Even at its most despairing and subconscious, “Ready for Heaven” feels like a wake-up call.
It conjures up some last, faint afterglow of the old belief that an electronic, programmed beat can smash itself – and you – into another, more egalitarian consciousness It is a remarkable fact that this bold and open-hearted record is made by one person, working alone.
Repeatedly reworking the songs until they were complete is a painstaking process that generated an energy and space where Angel Deradoorian could indulge in the arcana of her artform.
“I love the production more than the songwriting. […] In fact, I don’t even feel like a songwriter at times, I feel like someone who is just inspired by so much music. And I want to try it all out! Like Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Mingus, or ESG and Silver Apples, or making weird krautrock and industrial music. I love dub, and Sly and Robbie. I love the productions of those records and the collective energies released by their creators in the studio. It’s just a weird thing to do it by yourself!”
Angel Deradoorian, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known mononymously as Deradoorian, grew up in Orangevale, California. After leaving school to pursue a career in music when she was 16, she moved to Brooklyn and joined Dirty Projectors, appearing on their 2009 album “Bitte Orca”, which came out the same year she released her first solo EP, “Mind Raft”, produced by the band’s leader David Longstreth. Before releasing her debut album, “The Expanding Flower Planet”, in 2015, she guested on records by acts including U2, Flying Lotus, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, and Discovery, and followed it up with the ambient folk collection “Eternal Recurrence” in 2017.
Mirroring her spiritual journey, her next album, the meditative and jammy “Find the Sun“, saw her working with Samer Ghadry and Dave Harrington in New York. Between that album and her latest one, “Ready for Heaven”, Deradoorian teamed up with Russian musician Kate Shilonosova (aka Kate NV) to release “Ticket to Fame“, their first album as Decisive Pink, via Fire in 2023.
She developed, reworked, and tinkered tirelessly with the new songs, which in their recorded form remain fluid and kinetic while carrying a blazing, prickly intensity all the way through. Even at its most despairing and subconscious, “Ready for Heaven” feels like a wake-up call.
This stellar third solo album, which offers Downtown NYC dance grooves, Krautrock-tinged art-pop, Silver Apples-flavoured electro-psych, a solemn neo-baroque processional, post-punky collage spillage, diva soul synth-pop, and more. Giving this the clear edge over similar albums in the same zone is that Deradoorian recorded the whole shebang herself.
The Fat Angel Sings 