Joanna Adamiak’s effervescent pop returns with a culmination of her recent string of touching singles. I Wish It Was True is a uniformly emotive and heartfelt album of synth-led pop that’s gentle and smooth.
Preferring the synth-pop label, Joanna Adamiak is a singer and songwriter based in the Polish capital Warsaw. Her sound is atypically singer/songwriter-like with her twisting melodies and strong vocal presence taking center stage, but with backing music that’s mostly electronic and dreamy. Joanna’s cerebral lyrical style is always refreshing. With a factual approach to structuring situations and sentences, Adamiak is always capable of taking us along for a rich lyrical trip through her musings, observations, and wonderings.
The music on I Wish It Was True is a nice compliment to the dense lyrical style, because it is breezy, easygoing, and soft, taking pages from the books of Julee Cruise and Majical Cloudz and blending them with the Bjork-ish quirkiness of the lyrical delivery. The immaculate lightness of the album’s synth-pop is carried via a variety of soft synths and keyboards, airy mallets such as on the starter ‘Scenario’ and ‘Never Ready for Love’, bellowing pads such as on the title song, or playful, percussive keys such as on the bright and colorful ‘Reflection of Myself’, one of the albums’ more Bjork-like songs.
The songs on I Wish It Was True sound light and honest. Lighthearted too! I can’t help but envision Adamiak being an old friend airing some of her worries and vulnerabilities to us listeners through these gorgeous and easygoing songs. Stunners that are often sad but never hopeless, I Wish It Was True is a warm album that’s as honest as they could possibly come.