Music and Depression, Part II: How Do You Say You're Sorry, and There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of?

One thing that also works very, very well to make you (or me, please forgive the generalization here) happy is finding that a concert for which you had absurdly high expectations not only matches them, but flattens them completely. I've tried to describe that feeling to a number of people, but so far it's been difficult getting them to understand how and why that bubble starts to swell in your chest, uncontrollably, until you actually want to cry, tears of sheer… what? Joy? Pure, simple emotion? Beats me.

Fever Ray: I'm not even going to go into why an album that blends folk intimacy, gothic theatricality, hip-hop, smoked-out dub echoes, swampy, oppressive atmospherics and pristine, Ice-Queen electronics is perfect, because that would take way too long — and all you need to be convinced is a listen anyway. I will say , though, that I was **pretty psyched** when I bought tickets to her show at the Paris Olympia (where the concert was moved after a quick sellout at a smaller venue); I don't remember being that excited for live music since… at least a month and a half ago.

I got there just in time to see Zola Jesus start her set, which itself was a neat surprise: I'd been reading about her seemingly everywhere for a while, and had just got her album the day before. What a coincidence, I could've told myself, if her presence as an opener for Fever Ray wasn't so logical it was almost disturbing. I knew none of her songs, but prowling back and forth on the stage, she had the audience mesmerized. A fantastically gripping voice.

Then the lights went out again and the bubble started swelling almost instantly as rows of old, antique-looking lamps flickered onstage, in rhythm with crackling samples — creaking wood and running water, frozen generators in an empty street — and from that moment on, until the lights came on again, I (and, I think, the rest of the room) was hooked into a awestruck communion with weirdness, into a indescribable space in which cold and warmth, dawn and dusk, hopefulness and fear, were hard to distinguish.