Nida is whimsical on her new EP, Glimpses. Her press-doc informs that she is a singer-songwriter from Pune, India. Her music primarily deals with “themes of young love, friendship & self discovery, with a purpose of making her listeners feel less alone in their experiences.” An artist who grew up moving between cities, her arrival to Pune finally enabled her to delve deeper into music. She also “found her footing through live performances alongside seasoned musician Derric D’souza, & uploading snippets of her original music on Instagram – including her much-loved ALOSIA series … an intimate collection of songs that read like a love letter to Nida’s twenties – all the longing, belonging and trying to make sense of it all. With this debut, they poured themselves into every detail, every note, paying close attention to the layers, instrumentation and arrangement. The result is a set of songs that feel raw and intimate at times, and at others, like a shared celebration of life’s uncertainties. Glimpses is a tribute to their beginnings and a glance into where they’re headed – inspired by the joy of playing live and the instruments that first made them fall in love with music.”
On this record, the artist is in an almost consistent jovial mood, sort of skipping through moments of confusion, grief, and other heavier pit-stops. For the most part, the arrangement and the crafting of the music reminds me of early 2010s English, acoustic heavy indie-pop music in India – where you would get doses of optimism shoved between flowing soundscapes, all delivered in a candor that sounds more honest than perhaps any other genre or technique. A lot of the project, has Nida and her collaborator Derric, work with a spoken word, live-performance derivative, sound aesthetic that translates into this form of simplicity that really works in her favor. There is an almost jingle-like quality to the EP, and it ebbs and flows in directions that you can see coming – almost reminiscent of sugary backing tracks of small episodes of romantic web-drama. The EP is rooted in contemporary referentiality, laced in lingo that locates it now, in spite of its sunny mood feeling foreign in times like these.
One of the peaks of this record, is the titular Glimpses, which you can mistake for a predictable number till the last minute, when a soaring violin takes over, and gives the track the character and texture extremely necessary– and Nida’s vocals complement this ascendance, hollowing out, stretching and filling out in a form that reminds me of emails I can’t send Sabrina Carpenter, hints of Cavetown and some traces of mxmtoon and Lyn Lapid. Nida is a singer, she knows that her voice has a water-like quality that grants her songs a form of sweetness that works. You listen to the whole EP, and you do so in one listen because each song opens into the next pretty easily, and the guitars never interfere with the musicality of the project, although they do have a distinct liveliness to them. I don’t know is a pretty smooth number, as well. It has these notes of swing music, and it also does not follow a set pattern, and the artist plays with her voice and sounds, using the crowd chorus to construct an up-beat end. Her sense of humor, and her talking bits bring her closer to the listener — and at some point you realize that she is rooting a lot of the EP in a form of simulated interaction with a hypothetical audience, and the giggles, jokes, and the few segues into one-liners makes sense for the kind of spatiality she is building for the release.
There is one slight problem, however. A lot of these tracks have this interlude-like quality to them which makes them sound like they are leading up to something, but it never really comes. It almost feels like she is circling the well of opening something up, but does not let herself to depart from the enforced optimism. This is not a bad project, it has good music, sweet, jubilant music, and it also reminds me of the artist Ditty’s work in a few ways – however, the latter’s simplicity is also marked by experimentation beyond the jingle-esque sound, and playing with more dynamic textures.
Nida’s throaty, yet floating voice is a well of potential, and a lot could be done with it. The nostalgic sonic identity of this EP works, but I cannot help but wonder if it is breaching too close to sounding a little vacuous. This is not a reproach of either of the artists’ style, but rather an expectation of a little more vibrant of a spectrum from someone whose artistry is definitely commendable. There are brighter things that I believe the artist can do, and wait for, expectantly.
