Review Summary: I’ll love all your demons, because now they’re my demons, too.
Nicole Dollanganger is no normal artist, make no mistake of that. On the surface, Nicole Dollanganger is just another singer/songwriter with a cute voice. Though when you peel apart the layers behind this girl, you slowly start to notice subtleties and undertones hidden in her series of songs that reveal themselves like phantoms. These undertones are terrifying. Everything about Nicole Dollanganger describes the perfect “wolf in sheeps clothing.” Just a quick browse on her site can say enough about her disturbing nature as an artist. Seeing a cute girl hugging a doll with a slight smile and a look of naive isn’t eyebrow raising, it’s when you see behind her the varying amount of dolls and even doll like clothing where eyebrows begin to raise. Then you’ll notice her releases. Album covers with bleeding doll heads and disfigured ones, a picture of Columbine Massacre victims laying down, a lone girl in a dying graveyard, its around here where you begin to ponder about just what it was you just stumbled upon.
Then you hear the music. The voice of a haunting angel bellowing over the simplistic strum of guitar chords or maybe a few keys of a piano in complete silence. Angelic melodies about depression, broken bones, death, despair, sadness, disfigured faces, self harm, and many, many more disturbing topics of nature with a looming calmness and sweetness in her powerful range of strain and vocals. Each song almost sounds like they’re being delivered by a delicate child unknowing of her surroundings. Innocence being subjected to destruction and violence against their will. When you hear the odd chanting of
“gooble, gobble, we accept you” in
Cries Of The Elephant Man’s Bones followed by the yelling of a man all you can think to yourself is “Just who is Nicole Dollanganger?” The fantasization of these topics constantly presented without a single hint of sadness or empathy, just the constant looming of softness, lushness, and happiness is what makes Curdled Milk intriguing and beautiful in it’s own sick, twisted way. Curdled Milk is an album that is unlike any others out there. One that no other album will ever really be like. Nicole Dollanganger has brought forth a dark world unknow to many and has presented it in such a way that can only be wrote off as pure insanity. Rather it’s something that you would like or not, just experiencing such a disorienting experience such as Curdled Milk is one that will make it unforgettable and will weigh heavy on you for as long as you remain.
"I’ve been spending my time hanging out in hospital wards, bringing flowers and love letters to my quadriplegic baby, the ache of his colostomy bag and his blood transfusions, his medication makes him so sleepy but he still whispers to me, “death is pretty sweet”
