The Washington Post July 8, 1994

Plaintive Milla's Serious Comedy

"HOW CAN I be telling you my thoughts my love/when even I don't know what I'm thinking/How can I explain the way your eyes/burn into my mind, my love." How indeed. Milla--18-year-old model-turned-singer-songwriter Milla Jocovich [sic]--is forever struggling with words and emotions on her debut album The Divine Comedy, forever trying to make sense of love or the lack of it. She never succeeds, of course, but her tenacity is what makes the album worth hearing. Evoking a curious combination of childlike innocence, Harlequin romance and hippie sentimentality, her songs are tone poems of a sort, inspired by vulnerability and wariness, sung in a small, plaintive, unguarded soprano. At times she seems hopelessly lovesick, a prime candidate for any heartbreaker's ruse, but on "You Did It All Before," "Clock," and "Don't Fade Away" she sounds a lot older and wiser, no stranger to hurt and disillusionment.

What Milla's voice lacks in power and range, the arrangements make up for in color and texture, thanks to an unusual assortment of instruments that include harmonium, mandolin, bouzouki, guitar, dulcimer, kalimba, ukelele, flutes, and synthesisers.

(There'a a photo, two columns, square, of a close-up of her face, taken from the picture on the ninth page of the CD booklet, with this caption: Milla Jocovich, [sic] 18, focuses on love in her debut album, The Divine Comedy.)