Lorazopam is the fourth single from Renee-Louise Carafice’s debut album ‘Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight’ which was recently included in Nick Bollinger’s new book 100 Essential New Zealand Albums.

The video for Lorazopam is by Chicago-based director Israel Alpizar, who also directed the acclaimed clip for Renee’s first single, Bodhisattva.

Says Carafice -”This song was originally intended to be so melodramatic that it was funny. ‘Sometimes everything in you tells you to break out into the night’… come on really! But as the song got heard by more and more people, people’s response to it was quite different, they found it very sad, some people even cried listening to it. This interpretation is okay too. I hold a firm belief that life is a very funny and very sad thing.”

Renee-Louise Carafice is a dark-folk-pop songstress born in New Zealand, based in Chicago. With a bitingly honest and brutally fragile voice, she sings of her ‘messy rollercoaster ride’ of a life, over rich and complex melodic structures. She sings with an alarming openness about desperation, love, loss, homelessness and longing, all the while maintaining a sense of glorious hope at the end of the road.

Sixteen year-old Colin Lepper from Canada created and directed this clay animation music video for Renee-Louise Carafice’s third single “To Run” during his school holidays.
It took him 3100 still shots and two months to put together the beautiful end product.

“To Run” is the third single from Renee-Louise Carafice’s debut album “Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight” released on Monkey Records.
Written when Carafice was nineteen years old and having just read “Wuthering Heights” for the first time, this song was an attempt to express the discomfort she felt becoming a young woman and feeling trapped into a certain mould.
Although it fits so powerfully alongside Carafice’s songs of institutionalization, this is a song written long before those experiences, and it speaks of a more universal battle being played out: the battle between what you pretend to be and what you inherently are.

Renee-Louise Carafice’s debut album has been awarded the Alternatui Album of the Year by the NZ Music blog Counting the Beat.

“It may make for disturbing listening but Renee-Louise Carafice’s album Tells You To Fight is a stunning and unique album. By now, surely everyone knows that the songs on the album were her reaction to a period of hospitalisation for depression. On the basis of the early demos she went on to win a major cash prize and then produced this album in the USA. Carafice avoids the trap of producing a bunch of overwrought solo recordings that the subject matter may have suggested. The arrangements and production and Carafice’s unique voice result in songs that are dramatic in their content and delivery. This stands out as a great NZ album.”

Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You To Fight was also recently named in the top ten albums of 2008 by Nick Bollinger in the New Zealand Listener.

“House on Fire” is the second single from Carafice’s debut album “Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight”. It was written for Texan alt-country singer Micah P Hinson who Carafice met while supporting him on his New Zealand tour in 2005.
“We were instant buddies and got on extremely well,” Carafice explains. “For me that was quite a rare thing at that point in my life. We’d both been to hell and back and maybe you can attribute it to that.
“He’s a person who just tells it like it is, both in his music and on stage… he uses profane language and smokes endlessly and is just a very vivid personality.
“I was very impressed upon that this young guy who had so much in common with me was traveling the world with his music.”

Renee-Louise Carafice is a dark-folk-pop songstress born in New Zealand based in Chicago. With a bitingly honest and brutally fragile voice, she sings of her “messy rollercoaster ride” of a life, over rich and complex melodic structures.

Carafice sings with an alarming openness about desperation, love, loss, homelessness and longing, all the while maintaining a sense of glorious hope at the end of the road.

Some of the songs on “Renee Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight” hark back to Carafice’s experience with mental illness, and ultimately, institutionalization on her twenty-second birthday. But, states Groove Guide, “far from causing the album to be pigeon-holed by ‘context’, the music’s initial catalyst gives it a layer of heavy-lidded clarity – love, wisdom and longing by way of the addled brain.”
“Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight” was recorded in November of 2005 at Steve Albini’s elite Electrical Audio in Chicago. Engineer Nick Abbott (Finn Brothers, Goldenhorse, Datsuns) and Renee-Louise Carafice chose this famous analog studio because of a mutual admiration for the work of Steve Albini and the music to come out of there. The album was recorded to tape, a method which eliminates the temptation to chop up, edit and punch in… instead what you hear are the unchanged, full takes of each musician. No effects or eq were used.

Carafice teamed up with Angel Ledezma on drums (Defender, Alla) and Matt Lux on bass (Iron & Wine, Smog), without the two Chicago session musicians ever having met her or practiced the songs. The magic chemistry of the three artists, who on some tracks would record live in the room together, was undeniable, and Ledezma and Lux now act as her permanent backing band.

Ben King from Goldenhorse acted as producer and also personal chef while he, Abbott and Carafice stayed for 14 days in the building at Electrical Audio. During this two weeks in Chicago, Renee-Louise fell in love with the city and permanently relocated there soon afterwards, where she now performs and records. Since her move, she has opened for extremely popular US acts Xiu Xiu and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

In New Zealand she has performed alongside Goldenhorse, Anika Moa, Pluto and Goodshirt, as well as US acts David Pajo, Micah P Hinson, Band of Horses and Crooked Fingers.

2008 Alternatui ALBUM OF THE YEAR.

“Musically stunning”
- New Zealand Listener.

Reviews
NZ Listener
Elsewhere
Rachel King

Articles
NZ Musician

Interviews
The Wire
NZ Own Interview
National Radio

Live to Air
National Radio

Music Videos
Bodhisattva
House on Fire

‘Bodhisattva’ is the first single from Renee-Louise Carafice’s debut album, ‘Tells You to Fight’. The video was shot and directed by Chicago-based Israel Alpizar.

Renee-Louise on Bodhisattva
“One of my friends was really struggling, deep in this mess – a very melodramatic
character who had a reputation for feeling suicidal whenever he broke up with a girl..
I was driving my car to this party house where I knew my friend was… and feeling very strong feelings of sympathy for him, and of wanting to be a guiding light
for him… and this song came to my head, a very big song, full of instruments, like “leader of the pack” but different.”