Silia – “The Forbidden Resort Chronicles” review

Final verdict: ???

Is this the single worst idea I’ve ever had? Yes. Am I still doing it? Also, yes.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, and everybody else. I’m reviewing my own album here. Obviously I won’t give it a rating (for I cannot objectively rate it – I consider it to be my child, and you can’t exactly assign a rating to your own offspring), but I have wanted to write more in-depth about it for quite some time now. Why? Because I have free will, that’s why. And given how personal a project it is, I have many thoughts about it, ones that torment me on the daily.

But well, that’s enough balderdash. My name is Silia – nice to meet you – and this is my third album, released in January 2025. All I can do here is merely provide further insights and describe it from my incredibly biased point of view. You know, they say a parent can’t pick out their favorite child – but I, a proud mother of 4 (those being my three albums + Seiko-chan, my monkey son), hereby declare this album, “The Forbidden Resort Chronicles”, my favorite child of all. And I guess that is a stance that can be justified, in that I am incredibly emotionally attached to this work. I recognize it’s not perfect – hell, it might even be straying far from “good” – but given what it symbolizes for me, I can’t help but have the biggest soft spot for it.

Without getting overly sentimental, here’s the Silia lore; I was doing bad. Terrible. For years on end. It was a truly tormenting existence, the one I was desperately dragging myself through. It all reached a climax in early 2024, when, aged 17, I got hospitalized for a whopping two months. That brought about another maddening phase in my life, but I, being myself, couldn’t simply let it go to waste. Because sure, you can cry and cry about how miserable you are, but that’s not getting you anywhere. What you’ve got to do is romanticize the mundane, and romanticize the downright terrible – all without necessarily glorifying it. One should strive for greatness, but when that’s impossible – make the best of it, and write an album about the lack of good characterizing your despairing day-to-day. This album is the product of one such circumstance; after all, my catchphrase for it is that it is “pure torment and misery in a sparkly suit”. And well? That’s just what it is. Really.

To steal some one-liners from my press release for this album; “Indeed, [“The Forbidden Resort Chronicles”] falls under the synth-punk/alternative piano rock umbrella, while compositionally presenting romantic tendencies […] With the distortion knob turned up to 11 at all times, this thing hardly ever lets off – a metaphor alluding to the dizzying speeds of life itself. It’s electronic, it gets loud, and most of all, it’s unapologetically authentic all throughout.”

Yes, that’s right folks. This is one bold and mighty little album. Its unrelenting quality isn’t so much about the fast-paced status of ordinary everyday life; it’s more so about the speed at which your life can hopelessly go to shit, something that I am, indeed, very familiar with. It’s about as beat up and deranged as albums come, and therefore the purest expression of anger and anguish that I could construct, given my knowledge and skills. And honestly? I’m happy with it. I really am. This about sums up a number of the torturous experiences I’ve had, and the devastating consequences all the aforementioned paved the way for.

I am delighted to announce that by the time I started recording this album, I was feeling a lot better – that’s the sole reason I managed to bring it to fruition in the first place, anyway – though the experiences remained so vivid, that I could perfectly (to my judgement) capture it all in this short and sweet audio recording.

Another thing you might notice is that this record contains 3 cover songs – “Humoresque” (originally by Antonín Dvořák), “Minute Waltz” (Frédéric Chopin), and “Salad Days”, which is a medley of traditional kids’ songs. That has no deeper meaning, other than celebrating the art of those who came long before me – and surely, my own personal enjoyment of these pieces. I had a lot of fun covering others’ music, indeed – it was new territory for me, something I’m almost always willing to crack in my music production journey.

And before I wrap this one off, here’s a fun little anecdote about the cover art; see how miserable it is? That was the concept – I’m sure you can imagine how the idea came about, given the context. But what made it even more miserable, was that the photoshoot took place over the course of three 8-hour days in July-August 2024. Now, we are Greek; and Greek summers are exactly how you would imagine them to be. Scorching hot, and humid. So the team and I were sweating out asses off the entire time. I was tired, everyone was tired, we were tired and having fun all the same. But it was mostly the tiredness that came through in the final product. Oh well.

I suppose that’s all I can say about this album. Though, again, it’s far from “great”, and many folks may be put off from its funky sound, it’s a project that I hold very dear to my heart, and one that I will probably cherish forever. The best is yet to come, however – as my artist bio very accurately denotes, “The songstress’ work has been subject to criticism on multiple occasions, however, that is no discouragement for the music-producing youth, who has set out to noise-pollute the entire planet by 2030 at the latest”. Just you wait.