Album Review: Carla Geneve - Carla Geneve EP

Carla Geneve has stated that she wished for this EP to reflect her live performances, which to her credit it does. Some new acts struggle to recreate their stage energy in the studio, but the raw physicality of Geneve’s performance burns through here. Geneve and her band take a simple, minimalistic approach, but a highly effective one. Empty Stomach makes a devastating opener, her assertive voice and heavyweight guitar crashing through a sparse, silence-embracing backing. It thumps along at a funeral pace before imploding in a cathartic expression of frustration and disillusion. 

Showing a maturity well beyond her 20 years, Geneve’s writing is loaded with biographical details. In this vein, 2001 sets out a sometimes lonely struggle through life in hyperspecifities, such as walking home alone from a retro screening of a Stanley Kubrick classic. Overall the EP is well balanced as Yesterday’s Clothes looks over the wreckage of a terminated relationship with equanimous resignation, while I Hate You (For Making Me Not Want To Leave The City) closes the record on a quiet, confessional note. 

A well-rounded document, Geneve has stamped her authority over this one just as she does the stage.