Juliet Simms Becomes A Chthonic Goddess In Lilith Czar
As the ultrabrite-cherry vodka, buttercream fragranced 2000s pirouetted into the lavender heart-tabbed 2010s, and when I first met her, San Francisco-born, Los-Angeles-raised Juliet Simms was picking lavender and twisting the stalks along with lilacs into flower crowns – laurels for her girlfriends, basking on the hood of a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle, her getaway car ("Wild Child", "My Last Whiskey Tears"). But, this was only the mid-2010s incarnation of who Simms could be as a singer-songwriter. Simms’ earliest music piece, the former band Automatic Loveletter, was drawn as an anatomical heart punctured by arrows, and load-roaring lungs lighting fires to the sky. Automatic Loveletter’s first projects depict a safety pin whittled to a quill, Simms’ pen and voice carrying the might and promise of Perseus, and the honour of Athena. In the day’s pop-punk tradition, Simms led the creation of the richest star-shape sprinkled- and tying cherry stems’ electric guitars, rainbow lollipop fractal drums, and marshmallow icing production that captures then-Simms’ dreaming of a safe place, where noise wraps the body in the softest fig leaves, for their first album’s sound ("Click Your Heels (3 Times and Repeat)", "Black Ink Revenge"). Leading older brother Tommy Simms and Daniel Currier, she perfected her own aural scope of funfetti cake batter and satiny vanilla vodka, sticky like caramel bubble-gum. Innocent eves of coveting an older brother’s matches stolen from their mother, and running down boulevards, is crystallized, with a learning to see the beauty in burning, and the flames, that comes with surviving day-by-day the hell that is high school, as a different kind of girl ("Save Me", "Carry the Fire"). This work is akin to the fluttering of angel wings, Simms writing love letters to whom she admires, and over time, and poison arrows, she makes this in to a dagger. Over Loveletter’s projects, Simms still shares the vulnerability of swearing to her childhood dreamcatcher, ribboning with her lace, and kiss-printing her treasured letters. Eventually, the nostalgia and depth of warm brown sugar-cinnamon streusel, and the age of raspy, wandering cowgirl, cradling her voice, and guitars ("The Curtain Close").
Hand-picking baby’s breath and wrapping the fragile bouquets in a burlap blanket, in her golden sun-cradled garden of wild strawberries, blackberries and figs, becomes young woman Simms’ priority on these last Automatic Loveletter songs. The nuzzling of a spotted, white-tailed deer and the gunfire dots and dashes of a mother’s typewriter, sweetened, naturally, with her strawberry ice cream acoustic guitar, is behind her first solo features, as her own name ("Trouble Finds You" , "Phoenix"). Self-picked, sweetest strawberry-jammed electric guitars, bass and drums, swearing to a blissfully hazy, white rabbit’s mushroom state of mind, and, the delicacy and textures of iced chrysanthemums, fragile as lace, in order to fight off the responsibility, and the death, of becoming an 'adult,’ with the ambition that Simms’ has always lit. Coming in to her own, true, feminine power in her twenties, sharing chamomile tea in a poppy’s teacup, and tossing lucky golden horseshoes with her girlfriends, is explored on her singles under her own name. Part of this, including, sharing butterfly eyes over blackberry scones and an heirloom cardamom-whiskey in your boudoir, autumn’s warmth beating from matching heartbeats, dried wildflowers, thick charcoal and star anise smoke ("Cryin'"). Drying lavender and lilacs upon a rack and pouring atop them Venetian olive oil, honeyed and twine-stringed guitars, wild blueberry bramble classic rock compositions, and production taking the form of four-leaved clovers, is a key of mid-2010s Juliet Simms ("Get Ready"). Simms takes her listener to her heaven, her psychedelic skies, to honour and to make sense of an adolescence gilded in freedom, and tragedy, and saved as best as could be, by a grandmother's Chanel perfume and, Simms’ childhood acoustic guitar ("Found Missing"). Never does Juliet forget the snowdrops of her earlier years, ever-revelling in the sugar-dusted maple thumbprint cookies, mint-green ivy climbing up your grandparents’ rosy-brick home, and the creaking open of your grandparents’ or parents’ window to the roof, to bask in the dying evening.
Eagle arrows proud in a dartboard’s bullseye, an ace of spades in one’s back pocket, and fire blazing in one’s lungs, connects the work of Juliet Simms, to that of Lilith Czar. Under this divine title, finding and retrieving grandmothers’ lace, a treasure, with a beloved friend from an attic, to give her a second life, a project taken up hand-in-hand with and over glasses of cherry wine, has become unapologetic.
Simms’ first as Lilith Czar, 2021's Created From Filth and Dust, is reverent of Flora’s strawberries slumbering snugly in a picnic basket hand-woven of Demeter’s fallen laurel branches, and catching fairies upon lifted, patient fingers, and caressing their wings. Telling to Filth and Dust, the album’s first song, "Intro Poem,” welds this, with Edgar Poe's day and haunted imagination of time, electric instruments recreating teardrop decorated-spiderwebs, burgundy wine velvet curtains blanketing one’s skin like nectars, violet strings and brasses, and serpentine church corridors and monumental stained-glasses. The single "Anarchy,” is a revolutionary prophetess' hymn. It gluttonously seeks the decadence of poison ivy, a heavenly, and rich, darkest green, and searches for nostalgic eves – with drums and bass, as the bittersweetness of ripe cranberries, the sugariness found in the caress of wintriness that settles one’s bones. Czar’s lyrics, written and spoken as the incantation of a blood witch, a rebirth, a baptism - Simms finally possessing the opportunity to speak out on truths that could not be told, in an earlier time. On "Edge of Seventeen,” Czar haunts, through acoustic and electric guitars, and her singing, in a fine garnet-laced buttercream-white wedding gown, a forest, longing for a phantom that she knows. Dancing, in the singing evergreens, that promise something gone, could be found.
With moonwater-soaked sapphire instruments, Lilith recreates a lullaby of Swan lake’s feathers curling around each other – dancing on a chorus of porcelain, a frigid and knowing blowing wind from the rhythm instruments that picks up fresh blood-red roses, makes a tapestry of them, and, the smoke of devotional candles (spoken by the drums) ("Burn With Me,” "Diamonds to Dust"). Clementine honey vocals and Simms’ electric guitar, black cherries deserving of sugaring and autumn harvest’s pride pumpkins (captured from an acoustic guitar), and golden thorned-crown bass-heavy drums, cupped by Hera’s ox-eyed and strong-armed power upon her throne of gold, are key to Czar’s quieter moments. This tradition is used for evil on "Bad Love" – Simms’ vocals like a silver dagger-strapped garter, hiding, at first, on a romantic evening, upon the moor, as she slices a darkest obsidian-chocolate opera cake, a match to a chessboard mastered (her guitar’s chordal odysseys speaking for this fact). Yet, soon, Czar luxuriates in garnet’s blood-red raspberries (taking the form of her bass), a heavenly sugary mouth and a serpentine tongue, that teases her beloved of his secrets that she knows. The dreamy "In My Head" captures 2020-Simms’ apothecary Renaissance witch’s wielding a sickle, and a clandestine guidebook of spells and plants for potions (this second article, sought after by and granted to grieved women, who come, a pilgrimage, from afar), regal strings of a golden lyre, and Daphne’s pan flute, like the choral flapping of a monarch butterfly and a dragonfly’s wings. Simms features especially, on this principal track, her prideful knives-thorned blackberry walls, Persephone’s grown pomegranates, the Fates’ flour-winged cornbread, and cornucopia of fig caramel: the purest redemption, for the Juliet in Automatic Loveletter, that Czar has worn upon her sleeve, thus far. A symphony of lily-of-the-valley harp, cherry wine, night-lock violet, and metallic as crystallized wild anise, prepared by the widowed sister of “Get Ready’s“ winemaker’s mother, and maple sugar drum-thumbprints pressing in to dough is Filth and Dust’s last song, "King". Chewing upon the right oleander petals as candy, and enchanting talismans at a witch’s altar in a dream of myrrh incense, embodied in Simms’ acoustic guitar being as delicate as a bat's velvet wings, is Lilith Czar's conclusion, for now, at least.
As of this piece, Lilith Czar has two upcoming festival dates: Louisville, Kentucky’s “Louder Than Life” on September 28th, and Sacramento, California’s “Aftershock” on October 11th.
