A Rock Unsteady is the sophomore album from Toronto musician and vocalist Victoria Cheong aka New Chance. As an active collaborator in the city’s avant music and contemporary dance scenes, as well as a practicing astrologer, Cheong brings a wide array of influences to her mesmeric solo work. This new album combines spiritual strains of downtempo, dub, house and electronic pop, all underpinning a greater symbolic framework. Through subtle integration of dramatic idioms, the album hangs together as a narrative about power and understanding–and just how slippery those two things can be. As its title suggests,
A Rock Unsteady is an album made for this very stark moment of collective uncertainty, balancing equal parts precarity and potential.
Lead single ‘Oh Mercury’ plunges the listener into the album’s vivid universe. Opening with a dulcet verse of lyre and vocals, the tide soon shifts and the song drops into a lysergic reimagining of 90s dancehall. One of the central features of the song, and a crucial force throughout the album, is a vocal chorus featuring Isla Craig, Robin Dann and Felicity Williams (Bernice, Bahamas). In tandem with Cheong, they help sing out a keystone tension of the album: “Because the heart / can’t read the head / And because the soul / can’t read the circumstances.”
During the creative process, Cheong undertook an intensive study of metakosmios, a concept dating back to Ancient Greece, meaning ‘worlds between worlds’–the states between light and dark, spirit and matter, knowing and unknowing, the dreamscape. A Rock Unsteady is infused with this liminality, both conceptually and musically. It exists somewhere just beyond the vanguard of pop and well before the weighty trappings of art music. “There’s complexity in the composition and the ideas. But I also want it to be pleasurable; for it to be delicious and consumable,” Cheong reflects. “Music can be so simple and deep at the same time. This whole record is an exploration of endless depths.”
These depths are further elucidated by a shining cast of players from Cheong’s community: Johnny Spence (The Weather Station, Jeremy Dutcher) contributes keys, drummer Evan Cartwright (Cola, U.S. Girls) lends his rhythms, Brodie West (Eucalyptus) sits in on saxophone and Jennifer Castle guests with some unusually abstract twang. This marks the first time that Cheong has pulled collaborators so deeply into the New Chance orbit. As her ambitions expand and the project evolves, New Chance becomes more crystalline. A Rock Unsteady is a gem of club-adjacent poetry that refracts the many-layered nature of our living.
- Andrew Patterson
