Sarah Blasko
Album: I Awake
Label: Universal
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.sarahblasko.com

It would be all too easy to glibly dash off a review on the lines of "stunning fourth album from Australian singer-songwriter" and leave it at that. But that of course would be doing Sarah's achievement so much less than justice. For it's not so much an album of songs, more like an epic voyage through the soul, in glorious cinemascope.

Sarah's amazing voice and dark, cryptically sensual lyrics are cradled in wide-screen symphonic-scale orchestral arrangements that at their showier moments kinda recall the sweeping overkill of the Macarthur Park era and yet display an almost unbelievable degree of inner sensitivity. All credit, then, to arranger (Nicholas Wales) and players (The Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra). So that's part of my duty done - to prepare the listener unfamiliar with Sarah's music not to expect an identikit s/s, stripped-down lo-fi guitar-and-vocal job. No, this is something completely different, albeit rife with apparent contradictions - being grandiose and yet intimate in conception, lavish and elaborate in scoring and yet intricately and deftly imagined, duly weighty and yet on occasion intensely delicate.

Sarah's continually questing songs are given a keen sense of space and drama by a wealth of orchestral detail that could otherwise so easily have swamped her creativity, while the twisting, twining nature of her melodies conveys the internal drama of her songs and ensures constant involvement for the listener. The first four tracks are particularly impressive, right from the arresting opening, the pounding drumming, call-to-attention of the title track, and on through the slightly sinister eastern-tinged swaying string figures of An Arrow and the extended exotic rhythms of Bury This. Sarah's mature control of vocal shading is perhaps most evident on songs like An Oyster, A Pearl and God-Fearing, although her signature combination of breathy, husky fragility and reserved power sometimes puts me in mind of a parallel-career-path Becky Unthank moved on a few years (am I being fanciful?).

All Of Me is one of the more lightly-scored exercises: a tenderly voiced and comforting item that arguably steers too perilously close to the middle of the musical road in spite of its engaging confidences; Here also falls into that trap, with its swooning show-tune-like melody causing a bit of a distraction from the lyric. The album picks up again with the shimmering, elusive beauty of Illusory Light and the soul-gospel-inflected understatement of Cast The Net, moving seemingly inexorably to its determinedly optimistic, defiant conclusion Not Yet. It's that overpowering, dominant will to survive that ensures Sarah's ability to rise above that surging, fulsome orchestral tide in music of surprising power and strength and lasting impact.

David Kidman