Dorks And Losers

My first impres­sion upon hear­ing Los Angeles-native Steph Thomp­son, recorded as her musi­cal char­ac­ter Stef­falo, was filled with both daze and awe. My lin­ger­ing impres­sion after wholly lis­ten­ing to her album Would You Stay is anal­o­gous to imag­in­ing that your heart was on the cusp of exit­ing a seem­ingly end­less sta­sis: you’re exist­ing some­how and some­place, and for some rea­son it’s still okay.

Would You Stay is Steffaloo’s sec­ond full-length album. After self-releasing her debut album Meet Me In Mon­tauk, she signed with Mush Records, which pre­sented her with numer­ous cre­ative and col­lab­o­ra­tive oppor­tu­ni­ties (with Sun Glit­ters and Teen Daze being among artists and pro­duc­ers whom she’s worked with). The results show fur­ther explo­ration and exper­i­men­ta­tion with her voice, vision and sound, all of which are very evi­dent on this lat­est musi­cal effort.

Would You Stay is con­fi­dent and delib­er­ate. The open­ing epony­mous track is heart­break­ing, trans­port­ing lis­ten­ers to that sim­i­lar moment in everyone’s life where love, regret and loss became one gen­uinely iden­ti­cal feel­ing; the lyrics ” you should stay” repeat in an insis­tent man­ner, almost like a haunt­ing chorale cry of love’s lost battles.

Steffaloo’s bare bed­room pop style adds much to the emo­tional tur­bu­lence that shud­ders through­out the album. Sad­ness is ampli­fied, not eased on “I’m Sorry:” a whirl­wind of bad dreams that can’t stop being replayed over and over again. The thinnest ray of light couldn’t pos­si­bly pen­e­trate the thick dark clouds on “Rainy Fin­gers,” fore­shad­ow­ing the inevitable, mis­er­able fail­ures in “Fight & Flail.”

There is quite a bit of musi­cal vari­ety on the album. Stef­faloo moves effort­lessly through dreamy pop (“So I’ll Go”) to dreamy folk (“Oh No, Oh Dear”) to the ephemeral (“My Heart Beats,” which I couldn’t help but com­pare to Swedish singer-songwriter Anna Tern­heim). If you’ve never heard Steffaloo’s music, chances are that you’ve felt what she sings about in her music. Even after the songs cease, the raw melan­choly will no doubt linger.

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Track List

01. Would You Stay
02. So I’ll Go
03. Can’t You See
04. I’m Sorry
05. Lonely Night
06. Oh No, Oh Dear
07. If You Were My Baby
08. Rainy Fin­gers
09. Fight & Flail
10. I Would Have Loved You
11. My Heart Beats
12. The Whale And Me
13. You

[photo via Mush Records]

Note: Arti­cle first pub­lished as Music Review: Stef­faloo — Would You Stay on Blogcritics.