Diva & The Pearly Gates

Out on Leaving Records, The Haunted House is the latest EP from Los Angeles-based artist and musician Diva Dompé. Having spent the better part of two decades channeling otherworldly transmissions with projects including Yialmelic Frequencies, BlackBlack, and their current band, Diva and the Pearly Gates, Dompé returns with a deeply personal, unguarded song cycle firmly within the singer/songwriter idiom. The titular Haunted House is a memory palace of sorts—a portal to the densely-populated imaginary that has been the artist’s lifelong creative well-spring, and an introduction to the companions that dwell therein. Vampires, ghosts, outer gods, and spectral beings of indeterminate nature haunt the edges of these songs: cyphers for nostalgia, longing, ambivalence, depression, healing, and contentment.

Recorded in one week, straight to tape, on the outskirts of Death Valley (local birdsong infuses “Lillies Lay”), and engineered by Leaving Records mainstay and fellow psychonaut, Nico Georis, there is an unadorned quality to the Haunted House. With shades of Sibylle Baier and Judee Sill, Dompé’s phrasing is sun-dappled and earnest, an approach most evident on “Solar Kings”:

“I cry for a while / then watch some TV /
start speaking in tongues / cause I felt lonely /
I play one chord / then play it some more...”

Far from self-pitying, her plaintive delivery conveys the curious, altered states one accesses in the midst of a depressive lull. The Solar Kings emerge as the strange angels of this realm. And while their origins and intentions remain occulted, it is clear that Dompé derives a degree of solace and inspiration from their presence. Elsewhere, Dompé addresses the twin perennials of intergenerational trauma (“Poison Thorn”) and the intrinsic psychic loneliness of childhood (“Little Vampire Girl”). Eschewing simple narratives or easy judgement, the songs occupy a mythic register—these are ancient and in many ways eternal battles, to which Dompé, rather than fighting, bears resolute witness. 

True to its name, in song-craft and lyrical concerns, The Haunted House is something of a home-coming. Trailing the sonic experimentation of the Yialmelic Frequencies project, Dompé returns, armed (mostly) with a guitar and gilded articulations of a vibrant inner world. It is a release marked by otherness, apartness, and high weirdness, but its warmth is a universal salve.