La Sera is the stage name of Katy Goodman best known for her part in Brooklyn band Vivian Girls. 2012 has already seen the solo release of Goodman’s former Vivian Girls band mate Frankie Rose and where Rose’s album Interstallar was bright and danceable, Goodman has produced an album brimming with heartbreak and lonely sounding guitar riffs. A beautifully-crafted introspective album it will be adored by all music fans with an inclination towards ballads of ‘lost love’.
The album opens with the rambling guitar riffs of ‘Love that’s Gone’, a song rich with lyrics of rejection and instantly captures the listener’s attention. But unlike most songs/albums that are focused dissections of failed relationships, Sees the Light is more of an assertion of Goodman’s independence than a detailed description of her broken heart.
‘Please be my Third Eye’ has a fast-paced, fuzzy melody that is executed perfectly and doesn’t seem out of place alongside the album’s slower tracks. ‘Drive On’ is the stand out track, the tone of Goodman’s guitar lends the song an epic, show-down-at-high-noon kind of feel with the lyrics mirroring the grim melody - “drive off the edge into the sun/don’t look before you leap/ drive off the edge with me my love/they’ll haunt you while sleep”.
La Sera confirms Goodman’s superb talent as a songwriter, providing a platform to project the subtleties of her voice that are often lost within the wall of noise present in a Vivian Girls recording. The short duration of the album isn’t a negative in this case; the nature of the music lends itself to being played over and over. Sees the Light’s lasting impression is that it succeeds at being outwardly pretty sounding whilst managing to expose the listener to all of the intense emotion Goodman has stored up in her lyrics.
