Sing Out, Heart!

This is the debut full-length release by Germany's Karo - a girl who plays the guitar like a ninth grader at a campfire, and who somehow manages to take you to another planet with her hypnotic melodies and her beautiful, soft voice. Completely self-taught in both guitar and in the mastery of English, she taped herself and listened to her voice over and over again. She listened to Jeff Buckley, Ella Fitzgerald, The Carpenters, Low, Portishead, Cat Power, and Feist, developing in slow steps towards her remarkable sound - a mixture of full-throated, singer-songwriter confessional vocals, mixed with simple, indie-rock guitar patterns and sparse percussion, somewhere in the league of Julie Doiron, Bat For Lashes and Feist. "You Don't Know" and "Wine And Water" are the closest Karo gets to folk music, "Not In Love Song" is pure pop, despite its lack of drums, "The Hunger" and "My Heart Is Bent" are downright indie-disco, and no category has been invented yet for the breathtaking finale, "Sing Out, Heart!" - yet all of these songs blend together perfectly to capture a lifetime of heartache in 40 minutes that seem like 40 seconds and make you wanna put the CD on repeat forever.