Nalan - I'm Good. The Crying Tape (2021)

NALAN, that means quite literally "the screaming one" and "the wailing one". Perhaps also the one who can give suffering a fleeting form through the vibration of her vocal cords. And it is also both the civil name and the new pseudonym under which Nalan Karacagil will release her (at least technically speaking) debut album "I'm Good. The Crying Tape."

The record is conceived, it couldn't be otherwise, as a kind of modern siren song that should literally make you cry. But all this can be interpreted positively, especially on the musical side. The album also sounds like skating on Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, warm summer wind and breaking into the swimming pool as a distant memory of youth. A time machine to the teenage years, when the world seemed to consist only of pain and joy.
Accordingly, the record is composed of melancholy-tinged and cheerful songs, electronic synth surfaces, Timbaland-esque and 90-jungle inspired drum machine beats on one side of the spectrum, guitars and drums on the other.

So why technically the debut album? Well, in recent years, Nalan appeared mostly as part of the group Gaddafi Gals. But besides that, she also released her first solo EP “ugly” in December 2018, at that time still under her moniker slimgirl fat, under which she continues to DJ, while two EPs had already been released under the name Nalan381 before Gaddafi Gals. So far, so complicated. Anyway, for her upcoming first solo album she is now working for the first time with the Berlin label Mansions and Millions.

“I'm Good. The Crying Tape”: this is also the most personal phase in the work of the musician and writer so far. Right on the first day of the first lockdown, when it was feared that she would really only be able to go out on the street to shop, to spend months in quarantine, she began work, and indeed the first single “I'm Good” was born on that first evening. In the end, it turned into eleven songs.

On the producer side, the musician worked with walter p99 arkestra, who also served as executive producer and is also part of Gaddafi Gals, keyboardist Kiara Bo, and David Tobias of Dürerstuben.
"The album has a bit of a script, each song is like a single chapter for me, in which I highlight themes from different perspectives and moods," says Nalan himself.
"I'm Good," for example, is about the question "How are you?" to which one can almost only answer with a phrase. “Good. what else could it be?”. The single accordingly sounds very cheerful at first, but it quickly becomes clear that much of this is only happening on the surface. As "good" as one was promised, it does not end, that much can be revealed.

In "Only Birds Can Tell" this surface is also broken sound-technically, the piano chords sound melancholic, the 808 hums gloomily. In addition, the artist sings about the tragic loss of her grandmother, with whom she had grown up for a time and about strategies to remain positive and strong despite everything.
The story takes its course. "Bed of Tears" describes a feeling of powerlessness, the doubt about one's own existence, told like an abstract, fantastic film. Nothing seems real, everything like a dream from which you do not wake up, once again fueled by the apparent contradiction between poppy sounds and plaintive vocals.
The bonus track "Son Kez" (English "one last time") in turn is the only song in Turkish. It was inspired by covers songs she published on her Instagram channel, where for once she did not sing in English. The track, as Nalan, who grew up bilingually, describes it herself, could only be written and thought in Turkish. It ironically describes the despair of unrequited love, in which the main character unintentionally turns out to be a stalker in the end.
The slow-building "Crush," the last song on the album, feels like catharsis for everything that came before it. Everything is shouted out, the positive as well as the tragic, for now at least.