San Francisco Voice

I stopped listening to Jennifer Filzen’s CD Sirena over an hour ago and the first song, “Yo-Yo” is still stuck in my head. I mean that in a good way. I hesitate to use the word “catchy” to describe Filzen’s music because it’s such an over-used description but it really is the right word in this case. When this first song was playing, I felt the urge to get up and dance at my desk, as though I was inside of some private club filled with fun-loving kids who are thoroughly twenty-first century but have a love for all things eighties. That’s because there’s a lot of the playfulness of that eighties / nineties dance music in Filzen’s first song. Think early Madonna. And it’s easy enough to sing along with the music before you’ve heard it too many times. But the song does a good job of pleasantly catching you off guard … the chorus is catchy but there are interjections of unexpected instrumentals throughout the rest of the song that give you pause to really think about the music.

Although “Yo-Yo” was the song that remained stuck in my head, other songs throughout the CD caught my attention as well. While Filzen does have this retro dance sound in some of her music – a sound that really gets your hips moving despite your best intentions – she also has a variety of sound that speaks to the influence of multiple genres on her music. And this variety makes her entire CD worth a listen. What remains consistent through each song is the playfulness of her approach to music and the clearly trained quality of her voice.

Be sure to learn more about Jennifer Filzen from her interview with San Fran Voice.

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