PENELOPE TRAPPES - "Penelope Three"

By Paul Laird

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Is this a trap?

Is there a “Penelope One”?

A “Penelope Two”?

I don’t know.

I have stumbled across “Penelope Three” by Penelope Trappes quite by accident.  Someone posted something about someone else and that led me to listen to that someone which, in turn, led to listening to another someone…and then I was slipping inside the musical house of Trappes.

Who is Penelope Trappes?

Does it matter?

Who am I?

Nobody.

Never have been.

Never am.

Never will be.

But I suspect that who Penelope Trappes is does matter.

Crucially I think she is exactly as the music would lead you to believe.

Enigmatic.

Intelligent.

Curious…in every way?

There is a track here called “Red Yellow” which sounds like Portishead covering “Slip Inside This House” by the 13th Floor Elevators but, somewhere along the way, she has realised that her own words, her own music, is much more important than either of those things and so…something new arrives.

There is a cinematic quality to everything on “Penelope Three”.  The soundtrack to a film about love, loss, internal disturbances and external yearnings.  As if David Lynch had relocated to Brighton and decided to re-imagine Polanski’s “Repulsion” in a bedsit.

I wonder who would star in that?

Trappes herself?

Certainly there are moments here when her voice seems to be a ghost of itself, as if she is disconnected from everything around her and is searching for a reason to re-connect, or to find something else to belong to.  

This is dramatic, elegant and magical work.

It’s like a haunted house.

But a house haunted by something beautiful and delicate…not by trauma or darkness.  Or if there is trauma and darkness it has been confronted and challenged.  Musical exorcism with Trappes as Father Karras…a doubtful servant to a higher authority.

I don’t know.

I’m not sure any of it matters when the music is this special.

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