Sarah Shafey – Artist Review
The girl-and-a-piano motif has its innumerable accomplices, and we know that if done poorly it can smell of melodrama or, worse, musical theatre. When performed well, however, the lone voice and lone piano, with their harmony and play, their percussive and melodic possibilities, can project the ethereal. While Sarah Shafey’s music is often assisted by drums, guitar, and orchestral arrangements, these are never so dense as to take away from the second possibility.
Sarah is a Toronto musician I hadn’t heard of until quite recently. Her voice carries a certain mournful feeling which, as I have described in other reviews, I am fond of in good singers; and Sarah’s voice, even after hearing just a few songs, is evidently very good. Her album Tiny Music Box is being released through Squeaky Clean Records (which she herself founded), and features examples of her vocal prowess and effective, imaginative song-writing. “After Dark but Early in the Morn” begins with a mysterious piano intro, with howling “oohs” close in tow; by the time the main vocals appear like a Siren, the listener is hooked. While interviewed for the Artists’ Forum, where she has been selected as the artist of the month for March 2009, Sarah described trying to affect the theme of the “lone skeleton bride dancing on a black lake” in her work, which I would say she achieves quite nicely on this track.
While our genealogy-obsessed culture might require me to mention at first listen she might remind us of Feist, or a less jazzy Em Gryner or Regina Spektor, or Amy Winehouse on “Say No one,” and although her voice carries strong shades of artists as diverse as Nina Simone, Mirah and Bjork, she is, like others of her generation, quintessentially post-modern and interested more in defying sub-genres than being acquainted with any in particular. There are, therefore, always influences which we might miss. “5 Minutes to Go” has an almost bop jazz-meets-Beatles feel, I would say, something between the Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour eras. “Good intentions,” meanwhile, is a beautiful bare rhythm and blues and gospel track with zero drums, but featuring piano, beautiful harmonies, and unpredictable dips and swoops in melody.
Another song I was fond of, though it is not included on the album, is “Break Your Bones,” (locatable on her myspace) and which sounds like it begins by someone turning on an old drum machine in a musty suburban basement twelve years ago. How cool, I thought, when I first heard the intro. And then the guitars started. If Sarah is playing guitar on this track, then kudos. Among her skills seem to include understanding late 80s, early 90s twee/shoegaze sounds, not to mention how to use a fuzz bass in conjunction. There are heavy shades of 90s indie/alternative in the chorus lines which amused me greatly and led me to listen to it several times. If better produced, this song has potential to be a top-40 hit, though it might win praise with critics too if it retained its “basement indie feel.” Perhaps the two are incommensurable, but nevertheless, the song carries its own tiny cosmos.
If Sarah’s aim is to create a “soundtrack to life,” as she described to me briefly, then these songs are bold beginnings her foray. An album that took several years to make, and which arose out of the musician’s interest in making music without certain aim, for ostensibly the sole purpose and joy itself of making music, but whose sounds incidentally allude to exactly the opposite–the polished and thorough work of a visionary–should inspire our desire to listen.
Sarah Shafey – Good Intentions
Sarah Shafey – After Dark but Early in the Morn
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