Alessi’s Ark – “Notes From The Treehouse”

Notes From The Treehouse is 18 year old Londoner Alessi’s debut album. Alessi’s Ark is filled with an innocent kind of wonder at the world, her voice sounding otherworldly but strong as it carries words filled with visions of nature and magic. She uses an elegant orchestral arrangement, played by two thirds of the band Bright Eyes, to carry a lullaby-like love song filled with an easy kind of wisdom. The album’s opener Magic Weather, with its fairytale melody, dream imagery and baroque arrangement, it is really captivating. Alessi wrote one of the debut’s most epic songs, The Asteroids Collide when she was only 15; it’s about a long-distance love affair, using the metaphor of asteroids as bodies. Being so young her inspiration comes from books and films as much as it does from her own experiences. With influences such as JD Salinger and Edward Gorey no wonder Alessi is able to come up such a sophisticated body of work.