Ebyan Abdigir
Ladan
Hussein, known on stage as Cold Specks has returned with her most personal work
yet. The artist recognized for her twistedly enthralling lyrics and distinctive
soulful voice, has dug deep and returned to her roots. In this masterful body
of work, Cold Specks intimately explores her identity as a Somali-Canadian
woman. She’s unveiled and allowed herself to stretch her palette thematically.
The rawness that’s deemed Cold Specks a dark soul, has revealed itself to be a
cathartic after glow, illuminating the sort of light born through healing.
Like
waves thrashing in a chaotic sea in the middle of nowhere, Fool’s Paradise encapsulates the naturalness of existing during
difficult times. We find Ladan rejoicing the survival of those she loves while
mourning for the sorrow that continues to linger after it has beckoned its
doom. Far gentler than her electrifying sophomore Neuroplasticity and her midnight debut I Predict A Graceful Expulsion, Cold Specks has honed her artistic
agency and has invited you to bear witness.
During
the creation of Fool’s Paradise,
Ladan became obsessed with pre-war Mogadishu, her family’s home city and
Somalia’s capital while living in Toronto. “I just fell in love with the idea
of a city I’d never known, this beautiful city by the beach, I tried to imagine
what it looked like before the war,” she remembers.
The
record opens with Ladan’s emotive croon in “Fool’s Paradise” a song dedicated
to a semi-mythical Somali queen named Araweelo. For the first time, Cold Specks
sings in Somali, chanting “Araweelo,” a queen of female empowerment who was
also known to castrate male prisoners. Throughout centuries, the glorious queen
would either be painted as a heroine or misandrist in folklore. Araweelo is a
polarizing dream, like Cold Specks, always dangling between varying abstracts.
With melodic grace, Cold Specks sings in “Fool’s Paradise” a Somali idiom,
“kala garo naftaada iyo laftaada” which translates in English to “understand
the difference between your bones and your soul.”
Sonically,
Cold Specks has not lost her warm melancholy, in “Rupture” and “Ancient Habits”
textured wiry synthesizers drape her vocals alongside her weightful sentiments.
“Rupture” is the catalyst of the record’s woeful themes and sounds. Last year,
Ladan’s sister found a dear family friend laying in a pool of his own blood
after he had been shot steps from his home in Toronto. “I remember my mother on
the phone with her while we waited half an hour for an ambulance to arrive.”
Her lyrics are potent and mournful: “Fall back into place / Blood of no-one /
Made of gold / Worry, worry me,” Cold Specks sings emotively.
Lyrically,
Cold Specks sounds like her old self in “Solid,” hazily looking for a way to
identify a familiar ambiguity she yearns to understand. It was the first song
written for the album, she recalls. “I felt as though we had caught a sound
we’d been hunting for quite some time.” she says. “New Moon” is a personal love
letter to oneself about love and growth, Ladan says. “Witness” is about feeling
hopeless as the world collapses around us and we continue to hold on. The
dreary sulkiness carries on into “Void” a song drenched with water imagery and
bashful resilience about piracy by Somalia’s coastline. “Exile” reflects Cold
Specks’ process in creating this entire record, an ode to where she’s from and
how far she’s grown.
Growing
up, Cold Specks did not know much about her family’s life in sunny Somalia
including her father’s musical legacy. Her family immigrated to Canada before
she was born, and she’s never visited Somalia, despite touring Africa following
her second record. It was around that time a feeling of a home she’s never
truly known evoked in her. During her Neuroplasticity
tour in Australia, Ladan discovered from a relative that her father helped form
a famous band in the 1970s called Iftin. “He never told me about it growing up,
he just never talked about it, he quit music, started a family, moved to
Canada, and then the country fell apart.” The Iftin Band would often perform by
seaside downtown Mogadishu, sometimes doing covers of American hits. During the
writing process, Ladan dug deep into grainy vhs recordings found online of
Iftin and of many other Somali musicians, songs and videos that had survived
war.
“My
parents never talked much about life in Mogadishu growing up. The war split up
my family, scattered them around the world, left many missing, and those that
made it were forever changed.” she says.
As
the story goes, Ladan left Toronto and took a one-way flight to London in pursuit
of her music career after dropping out of university. “I was going to
University of Toronto. I was studying political science and English, I wanted
to get into law school afterwards. My parents were incredibly proud.” Ladan
reflects. Those were dark times, she recalls. She had lost a family friend to
gun violence two years prior her debut and was undergoing what she calls a
quarter-life crisis, grappling with depression, while discovering who she was.
Ladan kept her musical career a secret as to not disappoint her family’s
expectations.
“[I Predict a Graceful
Expulsion] was a record about loss but the depression carried on after that
tour. I had to consistently perform these very personal songs to strangers
while still dealing with it all and so I detached and removed myself from it. I
wanted to be erased,” Ladan says. In 2012, she used the moniker Al Spx in
interviews and shows. Cold Specks was a mystery woman.
“Eventually, I learned to dance divinely between two worlds.
I really discovered and learned to fall in love with myself and my identity,”
and it is apparent in Fool’s Paradise,
which feels like a carefully crafted purification.
Eventually, in 2015, Cold Specks would drop the Al Spx
moniker and embrace her name. Both her albums were nominated for the Polaris
Music Prize with the former also earning a JUNO Award nomination for
Breakthrough Artist Of The Year. Ladan’s career quickly took off in the span of
five years, dismantling her mystery and leaving fans and critics curious. She’d
collaborate with renowned artists, contributing to the works of Massive Attack
and Blue Note’s Ambrose Akinmusire. In 2013, she was invited to sing at Joni
Mitchell’s 70th birthday party.
After moving back to Toronto from Montreal, Ladan lived with
her parents for sometime in the suburb of Etobicoke. During this time, her
father would play her Somali music and they’d examine “the intricacies of the
beautifully woven words,” says Ladan. “The music is deeply poetic and almost
always centred around these stunning voices, so it was important for me to
fully grasp it even if I was twisting my mother's tongue,” she adds.
Fool’s Paradise is
what finding home sounds like, and Cold Specks has sailed her way to shore
after gruelling trial, error, and musical acclaim.
On Fool’s Paradise,
Cold Specks is fully realized. She exists as an artist gutting life by its
balls, she is both darkness and light.
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