Cali Bellow’s uncanny valley music spans the sweet and the scary

The Opener is The FADER's short-form profile series of casual conversations with exciting new artists.

Leah B. Levinson moved from Los Angeles to Altadena, California, in the depths of COVID lockdown. With social gathering prohibited, she and her partner acclimated to their new surroundings by roaming empty streets and taking long hikes in the nearby national forest. The ecosystem is spacious and sunny, but it’s also home to the infamous Devil’s Gate Dam, where Thelema occultists Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons are rumored to have carried out rituals in the 1940s.

“There’s this feeling of freeness and openness and largeness, but then there’s the darker side of all these things,” Levinson tells me on a video call. Freeness, openness, sunshine, and the sinister things that live within them manifest themselves in strange ways on Ciao Bella, the new album from Levinson’s solo project Cali Bellow, out October 25. It’s her fifth full-length, but it feels like an arrival.

Levinson, who also plays bass and screams in the ecstatic black metal band Agriculture, calls her last album, AMERICAN DIRT / going places, a “purging of classic songwriting and making music as a band.” For Ciao Bella, she gave herself a nonnegotiable constraint: no real instruments. Alone in an uncanny valley of samples and MIDI, her vocals crystalize; whether she’s crooning, shouting, or speaking, her presence within the album’s self-contained world is undeniable.

The album’s synthesized instrumentation wasn’t the only thing that helped her lock in. “When I started this album, [I was] at a point in my gender transition where I felt comfortable in my body for the first time, and that affected my artist outlook,” she says. “I stopped feeling like I was trying on different clothes musically and did something that was exactly myself as an artist.”

The intention behind the odd structure of Ciao Bella — front loaded with bangers before drifting into a liminal space that’s split open at the end of side A — was to build a world from the ground up. “It keeps ramping up in tiers, and then, by the time you get to the center, you’re like ‘Oh, we’re finally here,’” Levinson says. “The whole A-side is one big escalation, establishing the boundaries of the album; the B-side is experiments within that world.”

Ciao Bella’s brief intro sounds suspiciously similar to Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Otherside,” though Levinson claims she’s not a fan of the band. Its main, Flea/John Frusciante-jacking riff is the first of several motifs that recur on the album. The most prominent theme of the record comes a track later on “Morning Breath.” Hiding in plain sight within a sweet, simple refrain is a dark message that returns in slightly altered forms throughout the record: “Don’t you know there’s something wrong with you?”

“The twee, dreamy aesthetic is interesting to me because it’s always close to slipping into something else,” she tells me. “Cute things are the other side of the coin of monstrous, dangerous things.”

“Morning Breath” is followed by “LFG!!!! (i just died),” a kitchen-sink bop that epitomizes the album’s obsession with synthetic sounds while exposing both sides of the cute and monstrous coin. It’s based on an ecstatic experience Levinson had on a trip to Long Beach for her partner’s birthday in 2021. “We were on this cliff that’s hundreds of feet above the ocean,” she says. “I was overwhelmed by how high up we were, feeling a sense of my smallness in the world.” She evokes this feeling with the song’s minimal lyrics and maximal arrangement: infectiously driving (MIDI) bass, crunchy (MIDI) guitar power chords, and a dozen other synths and (MIDI) drum sounds. “We went down cliff today / Saw the sea, thousand high,” Levinson sings, her voice awash with Auto-Tune. “It’s two-thirds Earth surface / Just the top / I might die.”

For a few slow tracks, Levinson gives us room to breathe and dream, but she jolts us out of our reverie on “(I Can’t Wait To Be) Rendered,” unleashing black metal screams over an old-school hip-hop breakbeat. “Screaming’s so weird; it’s such an embodied way of using the voice,” she says. “I wanted the scream on that song to carry a sense of vastness, not gnarliness or intensity, like it was coming from far away and reverberating out.”

Ciao Bella ends with “Energizer (They Bring Me Flowers)” and “Et Bon Voyage,” songs so sweet they verge on saccharine. She compares this ending to “the track that plays when the credits roll in a teen movie or Shrek.” But there’s that line again: “Don’t you know there’s something wrong with you?” There’s something wrong with all of us in the end, but there’s hope to be found in the space between the human and the machine.