Louise Distras ‘Beauty After Bruises’
Beauty After Bruises invites you into Louise Distras’ exuberant, retro sound land. Rich and full of layers, but in heart, it’s just good music. Distras has the voice of a power voice. Her genuine performance with tears in each powerful moments touch you deeply. She rocks these lyrics with all she has. Her music is alive. They aren’t just songs to sing, but to be experienced.
Beauty After Bruises reminds you of Avril Lavigne and Paramore with punches and attitude. Beauty After Bruises is fully entertaining and captivating. The songs on there are ear worms, but not the one to eat your brain out, but the kind that heals your wounds and nourish your heart.
With a Lana Del Rey kind of moodiness and nostalgia, Beauty After Bruises recalls a retro aesthetic and a charismatic blend of mood-filled, desert palettes and sultry soundscapes. Like the ocean and the desert coexist in every single song, it feels like the great California landscape permeating through the sound walls with a full smash of emo, rock and punk.
Every track is a fuzzy celebration on its own. There are stories to be heard, messages to be spread, words to be said. Like in “Hollywood Drug,” Distras speaks about the chase and illusion of fame and the creation of this illusion. “She fell broken on the street. City of angels. These streets are selling dreams, dreams that bleed your soul,” Distras sings. Her words pierce through the mice, speaking with much emotions.
“Hollywood drug made Marilyn Monroe. Lonely she weeps, weeps all alone. Cleansing her blood from a concrete star. Do you wanna be someone else?” Her words are thought-provoking like a memory-triggered time capsule that invites an overlap in time.
In “Time Heals Nothing,” she talks about wounds and shadows that can’t be erased. Her poetic lyrics always have feelings in the theme. “Your words are dreams from a thousand miles,” she sings on “Forever Is You.” “Today you’re gone with lies untrue. Take me with you. Take me with you.”
Beauty After Bruises is an album that takes you breath away. It has much potential in live performance—even in this studio album, you can imagine hearing the resounding echoes of captivating melodies coming from waves of crowds and having Distras’ vintage lovin’ sounds filling up the entire stadium—it’d be memorable.
