Estonian expat Maria Minerva may have found her footing in the cultural battlefield of Brooklyn, but her recent music continues to confound easy assimilation, crawling further into the crevices between karaoke fantasy, hall-of-mirrors pop and meta dancefloor mind-games. Histrionic begins bluntly, "Sometimes beauty and brains are not enough," before breezing through a bewitching eleven-song cycle about ivory towers, underground spirit, galactically challenged romances, predators vs. prey, seeing the soul, and the ennui of identity amid the metropolitan maze: "Tables are turned / Bridges are burned / You fooled me once / But then you fooled me twice." Sonically, Minerva threads in shades of woozy trap, London bass music, Eastern European cassette kiosks, '90s diva house, phaser ballads and ambient rave, sketching a soulful self-portrait of her own inner ecosystem of loves and labors lost. It's a strange, stimulating surf across the weird brainwaves of an artist exploring an intriguing new pipeline of inspiration.
