Reminiscing over her personal mythologies in lyrical laboratories where Astral Weeks and Blue Afternoons were discovered once, long ago by famed artists of the 70s, exploring new and ancient drifts adjacent to theirs, she has mined nine fresh songs that fuse the abstract/poetic to an evocative and immediate tactile sensuality.
Dana’s playful wordplay harnesses the skyward impulses of her underlying murmurations, emotively processing shafts seams veins lodes of raw language and memory into galvanized lyrical alloys. The resulting constructs infuse these tunes with a bucolic and slightly evasive sense of wonder, magnified throughout by the pervasive riffing hypnotism of the collaborating musicians, under the direction of her producer, Sandro Perri.
Nuanced and nomadic, atmospheric and felicitous are her adjectives. The songs, she says, are “meant to bring some folk magic into my healing processes,” with, as always, a nod towards the cosmic.
Her special formula of phosphorescent phonetics begins on the opening track, “Star City,” commemorating a favourite coastal retreat where “You’ll find you’re not alone no matter how you try.”
Over the course of the song, “Spring creeps in, a ripple on the breath of wind,” with insinuations of warmth from a richly-toned saxophone.
It’s followed by “Gemstone,” a crystal geode metaphor over steady fingerpicking and sparkles of flute. “When they crack you open do they find you glowing?”
“Soft Feeling” describes the emotional bundles of sensation that
accompany a deep friendship. Besides containing the album title, the lyrics confess to the most romantic feelings of intimacy on the record.
The delightful “Moondance” features more fingerpicked guitar, some waves of piano blues and a soulful choir, and anticipates the title of the next track, “Songs of Longing.” In that song, Dana yields her hopes for a dreamed romantic reunion to the comfort of deep memories as she realizes that “All of a sudden baby I’m short on time.”
Much of this record was in fact composed in the wake of a health scare that the singer experienced during it writing. In the Hour and the Glass, she again seeks relief from a crisis state with the help of music, specifically the blues, and the “cosmic love“ that it reliably provides.
The evanescence of life is introduced in the metaphorically-titled
“Passing Clouds,” a song buoyed by a vibraphone and amorphous sound effects, and anchored to the earth only by insistent guitar picking and the intimations of mortality in the lyrics: “I may be going too / And you know that when I go it’ll be some time til I’m coming home.”
The lead preview single for the album, back at the end of 2025, was “Strange to My Mind. It encapsulates the sensation of dislocation from oneself that can occur during meditation, or in an awakening, in what Buddhists call “the very subtle hour,” when it seems, as she sings, “the body’s just a story / It’s a map so full of windows…”. The song served as a good introduction to the record back then as it hardwires the listener to a comprehension of Sipos’s dichotomy of narrative perspectives as she constantly ranges from the personal to the astral planes.
“Blooming Heather” is the title of the closing song; it is soaked in strings and redolent with the fragrances of imminent summertime (“For some the saddest season“), and with the bell-tones of guitar harmonics, muted finger snaps, alpine echoes, and the cautionary smell of smoke it serves up a climactic incident to end the record.
Although it was released in January, Golden Molten is achieving more immediate relevance this month as Dana (pronounced Danna) heads out on a tour that will criss-cross Canada, beginning March 25, significantly, in Golden B.C., just west of Banff. She will then proceed to hit all the major urban centers in Alberta, wind through Winnipeg, and infiltrate Ontario on April 7 for a whirlwind four nights in Guelph, Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton.
After a touch down back in Saskatoon she will make a thorough sweep of British Columbia in late April. Dana will be accompanied through it all by the rising Victoria-based singer Miina, whose debut album, Where the Light Goes, will be arriving shortly. For tickets and info you can go to
http://www.danasipos.com/tour
The after-effects of Dana Sipos’s capriciously slurred lyrical grace-notes affix affectionate melodic rings of memory to these songs, ensuring the necessity of your enjoying further listening. Golden Molten is a healing record. I suggest that you apply it therapeutically, soon, while it’s still spring.
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