BY PETER HUMMERS | Natasha Borzilova, vocalist and guitarist with the band Bering Strait, who played the Outer Banks Forum, is releasing a solo CD that begins stealthily:
After a little vamping, Natasha sings, quietly, Did you check the message that I left on your answering machine?
Like an approaching storm, the pressure builds: I know you listened to it when she left the house.
The band ramps it up and Natasha takes it up an octave, bringing the thunder: I’m angry….
The band is now crashing headlong and Borzilova’s grand voice has the listener hooked. She wrote the tour de force and she and the six-piece combo (she plays one of two acoustic guitars on the cut) realize it powerfully.
When she played the Outer Banks, I especially noted her singing. Her guitar-playing is no less remarkable, not what one might expect from such an angelic-voiced beauty. With Bering Strait she occasionally took inventive lightning-quick solos on her acoustic, and of a piece with her musicianship is her songwriting ability. (She wrote or co-wrote all the songs on the CD.) These are fully realized songs that would fit in well in the current AOR-Nashville-pop continuum. Actually, they should dominate it. (Contemporary country music stations are playing some of the most interesting pop music today.)
Borzilova’s songs are endlessly interesting, from bare acoustic ballads to full-tilt rockers, laden with hooks, and with choruses, bridges and instrumental passages that perfectly fit the concept of each song. Nice touches abound, like the loping 6/4 time signature of “How Do You Do That?”
And that voice — it’s a charming, throaty mezzo-soprano that she can wrap around any intervals she can write, while remaining completely natural-sounding. Her phrasing is that of normal speech, which will draw the listener right in. And that listener would never guess that Borzilova’s first language wasn’t English.
The stories in the songs are nearly cinematic, too. Borzilova’s talent is wide and deep: From writing the songs to playing and singing them, she is outstanding. The musicians on this CD play as well as one would expect from Nashville cats, that is, expertly, complementing Natasha’s skills and lifting her up to centerstage.
On her website she writes, I remember driving home from the very last tracking session after recording the instrumentals for
Cheap Escape,
Dear Diary,
Something I Never Knew About Love,
Fatal One Day,
and Real Fight
and thinking that I would buy these tracks if I heard them playing in some music store, just as they were.
True enough, and the talent of Natasha is the fundamental piece of the equation. (And the added lyrics and vocals of Natasha make the tracks irresistible.) This music needs to be heard, and some samples from the CD can be. They’re well-chosen, and should whet the whistle of those music-lovers looking for the next big thing.
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