Released: 25/08/23
The new album from the Californian avant-pop maestra Spellling – AKA Chrystia Cabral – is quietly revolutionary. Recorded with her touring band, the collection of tracks on Spellling & the Mystery School are in fact new versions of songs taken from Cabral’s critically-acclaimed discography: the 2017 breakthrough debut Pantheon of Me, 2018’s multidimensional synth-based project Mazy Fly, and her expansive third album, 2021’s The Turning Wheel. So inspired, and markedly different, are the reimagined versions that it’s perplexing as to why more artists don’t take the same dialectical approach; for in treating her songs as fluid creations which exist on a continuum, rather than reified, ‘finished’ objects, Cabral has created an enchanting and remarkable alternative reality.