Chandelier

The Puppini Sisters' fifth studio album, The High Life, is the trio's first with Emma Smith joining original members Marcella Puppini and Kate Mullins. Aside from new membership, the vocal group stays the course, offering more of their close-knit, three-part harmonies on versions of big-band classics, a couple of original songs, and swing era-inspired rearrangements of more contemporary hits. The trio holds a few surprises in its selections of the latter, such as a medley of the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" and Sia's "Chandelier," and a fluid cover of Missy Elliott's "Work It."

Maneuvering between grandiose retro motifs and a surprising sincerity, Michelle Gurevich’s songs are tragicomic, melody-driven, sentimental and suspended in shadowy glamour. Having released 3 albums under the moniker of Chinawoman, she now continues as Michelle Gurevich. She combines dark realism with humour in smoky and intimate ballads delivered with cutting and fatalistic lyrics. Her story began when her bedroom-produced debut album Party Girl, by some fateful unknown hand was delivered to the land of her forefathers, and soon made its way blaring from the yachts of Russian billionaires and as the ringtones of mothers all over the Ukraine. Her music has drawn comparisons to Nico and Leonard Cohen, with a voice akin to Tanita Tikaram. Decadent, dramatic and earnest, vintage keyboards and synth strings offer the solitary rendition of a grand experience, and a voice always upfront delivers motifs familiar yet impossible to pinpoint from the great soup of European chanson.