Album Review
The photographer who harvested Sarah Jaffe’s song “Swelling” for his documentary on the war in Iraq once spoke in chapel at my small Christian high school. In front of a screen mostly used for Power Point presentations about how to get to heaven, David Leeson clicked from photo to photo of dust and furrowed brows and blood and sweat; one of a man alone, facedown in surrender to an oncoming tank. There was very little exposition. He wore a ballcap and looked tired.
Later, I saw a photo in The Dallas Morning News of David Leeson hugging a coworker after he won a Pulitzer Prize for those pictures. He had captured the quietest moments of a conflict swarming with media and gluttony of pride and stacking troops and sonic banging; so much confusion blaring through talking heads and TV sets. David Leeson’s account, though, and the impression he gave in person, was that of a witness to the moments in which all breath was spent.
Sarah Jaffe’s new record seeds this kind of artistry. She named the six-song EP Even Born Again, a string-heavy lullaby of a track she whispers to herself in the midst of stretching out of some shy place where the songs she wrote were hidden. Writers with clout scrambled to gloat first about the attention Jaffe will bring the North Texas music scene – even one sent to Denton by The New York Times, who cast her as the town’s next Norah Jones. Jaffe’s a big deal, sure, but he was confused. This girl’s smarts go beyond swoony hooks. Her songs are the kind that benefit from a band that doesn’t do background music at dinner parties. They are literary.
Producer, John Congleton of the pAperchAse, treated the guitar-based material on Again with a reverence for the emotional range of Jaffe’s voice and how the songs reflect it best. The vulnerability is never uncomfortable, and the force doesn’t seem contradictory. It’s a balance between hints of Tori Amos’ “Silent All These Years” in “Backwords/Forwards,” when Jaffe’s belting and plucking climbs down during the bridge; and the delicately resigned “Adeline,” that rare moment when an Elliott Smith fan can hear his memory honored subtly in new music. Don’t know if she meant to, but she did it right.
The best thing cursory Jaffe followers get from Again is “Under,” a gritty, chugging train of a song. Fittingly here, in a departure from the torch songs, she turns on the listener, liberating herself from expectation: “Ain’t nobody’s girl, I’m nobody’s man.”
For the newcomers, it’s Jaffe’s voice that will get them out to shows. Sometimes she sounds like an emphatic Hope Sandoval, with all the foggy, new-Southern sexiness of the Mazzy Star singer in transitional lifts and dips. But there’s a wall of sobriety around Jaffe’s voice, and she resolves phrases where hope would have trailed off in watercolor, riddling us in druggy suggestion.
That articulation — in the songwriting, in the voice — shoves Again into the pile of albums you’d want to indoctrinate your little sister with, the ones she should listen to by herself, as she develops an interest in those girl singers who can play guitar. And when that subversive curiosity develops into an awareness of the underside of things, the beauty that hides behind what’s crowded, she’ll remember her first impression of Sarah Jaffe.
