Ottilia :: "Heartless"

Ottilia is still one of the brightest young stars in independent music. Still a teenager, perhaps the best metric of this future success is the conspicuous disappearance of her most infectious track, "40 Million Light Years" from the Internet. This is the empty space that signals an arrival, a reverse dramatic irony where the people on stage know something profound that is hidden from the audience. The joke is on us. On latest demo, "Heartless," Ottilia pursues a more meditative aesthetic, channeling Lykke Li, Amanda Mair and others. The song muddles along under its own power, persuasive in its austerity and the central lyric of the chorus, "If I had a heart left to love you, I would do," one of those grammatically incorrect statements that holds a disjointed and terrible power.

Ottilia :: "Forty Million Light Years"

She's in your ear, you think, or is it your head? Close enough to make you pleasantly claustrophobic, 17-year old sensation, Ottilia and her perfect first single, "Forty Million Light Years" whisper an instantly memorable melody and a vocal so charming you'll struggle against your vocabulary to say anything besides, "precocious" and "phenomenal". A flecking guitar line that recalls the work of Phoenix on "Lisztomania" mixes easily with Ottilia's disarming vocal singing vaguely fatalist lyrics like "Walls keep closing in and I can't win." She manages to save the listener and herself right before the chorus kicks, posing the coquettish, "But then again..." before trailing off into a refrain you'll find yourself singing without meaning to. It's glossier than Ellie Goulding's "Wish I Stayed" demo that seized the music industry by the throat in 2008 but the potential is the same, a young, big voice who can craft pop with the ease with which you make your morning coffee. With "Forty Million Light Years", Ottilia does a similar removing of the ceiling on what could be a mercurial rise in 2012 and beyond, all of which is close enough to be in your head already.