THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Ciao Bella is an ambitious and anomalous record exploring dark fantasy, artifice, aesthetic cuteness, meaning, abstraction, pop song forms, the limits of genre, gender and spirituality. Over the course of three years, L.A.’s Cali Bellow — the alias of Agriculture singer-bassist Leah B. Levinson — crafted the album between extensive walks through the neighborhoods, parks, cemeteries and hills of Altadena, as well as hours of devotionally attentive time in her shabby home studio. Ciao Bella is soaked in its surroundings while teasing the opportunity to retreat to another world altogether.
Fueled by essays by Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, video games like Dark Souls and Super Mario 64, and popular media like The Muppets and Hellraiser, Ciao Bella synthesizes a broad range of themes and interests, serving as a statement of purpose for the longstanding project of Bellow. Across the album, Levinson uses MIDI instrumentation and electronic vocal processing to meticulously explore and combine sonic worlds while engaging with a liberating mode of artificial polyvocality.
Exercising a decades-deep relationship to songwriting and production, Levinson pulled inspiration from a wide range of music, including the formal excess of prog rock, the absurd playfulness and melodrama of hyperpop, the worldbuilding and intensity of extreme metal, studio experiments by Enya and The Beach Boys, and the simple joy of a well-crafted song. A point of arrival and an introduction, a goodbye and a hello, Ciao Bella is an anomaly from start to finish, a work that unveils itself with every listen.
Energizer (They Bring Me Flowers), the third and final single from the album, is effervescent and thrilling — a blown-out hyperpop shoegaze anthem that distills the album’s vision, balancing emotional songwriting with genre-obliterating sonics that aim to reconcile our inner and outer worlds.
“On this song, I drew inspiration from gospel and modern worship music to express a sort of spiritual feeling of presence that can occur in daily life. The lyrics meditate on love and mortality in their simplest forms and the work it takes to stay with them as basic truths. Sonically, I was inspired by less-cited aspects of classic shoegaze and dream pop, namely an emphasis on texture and presence in the recording. My goal was to create a crisp and dry immediacy that blended with more spacious, reverberant elements. Dreamy, poppy, sugary, and plastic.”
