I’m feeling worn out, ground down
and tired. I’m also feeling stubborn though and stubborn goes a long way with
me. In this case, stubborn is giving me enough energy to power through fatigue
and melancholy, write my next review and keep this odyssey going.
Sleep is for the dead, my friends.
Disc 758 is….Surfacing
Artist: Sarah
McLachlan
Year of Release: 1997
What’s up with the Cover? Sarah sits in a chair, so deep in
thought that she’s seemingly unaware that she’s totally using that chair
backwards.
How I Came To Know It: This is McLachlan’s fourth studio
album, so by the time it came out I was already a fan and just buying her
albums as they came out.
How It Stacks Up: I know I just gave “FumblingTowards Ecstasy” the silver medal not 58 albums ago, but I recant!
“Surfacing” is the second best Sarah McLachlan album in my collection, just
short of “Solace.”
Ratings: 4 stars
Sometimes we begrudge our favourite artists getting
famous, because it feels like we’re losing them to the masses. With “Surfacing”
we should just feel proud that Canada’s hometown girl, Sarah McLachlan, was
being introduced to the world on such good terms.
The album performed brilliantly all around the
world, and along with the Lilith Fair tour, helped establish McLachlan as an
international celebrity. As for me, I never made it to a single Lilith Fair (or
even a Lollapalooza), despite plenty of good intentions on both counts. What I
did was play the living crap out of “Surfacing” for years.
The album doesn’t have the raw edge of her previous two
records, but that just makes all its deep emotion more surprising. The
production is classic late nineties. The drum machines of the eighties had long
been rejected, but we hadn’t reached back to the organic seventies just yet.
The songs all have an artificial air. The guitar has to be distorted, the notes
have to be drawn out and everything has to run into everything else.
All that ambient sound and fuzz could easily pull you
out of the experience, but instead it draws you in, like a warm bath or a good
book – or both, if you are one of those people who’s willing to risk getting
your book wet.
It does occasionally overstep, such as the odd beeps
at the beginning of “Sweet Surrender,”
but that’s not one of the better songs anyway and besides, these errors are
rare. For the most part the production matches beautifully with the songs.
The album opens with “Building a Mystery” which is a character study, or maybe a series
of character studies. For me, it is about how we build our characters in the
first place, revealing our natures in our own constructs. I love how Hallowe’en
makes people behave more like their true selves by giving them the shelter of a
costume. “Building a Mystery” reminds
me that we do this every day, just with more subtle brush strokes.
When she does strip down the arrangement, McLachlan
still sticks with lots of echo, as she does on the quiet and devoted “I Love You” and the more upbeat but
regret-filled “Adia.” “Adia” is a beautiful song that shows off
McLachlan’s songwriting, singing chops and also a light touch on the piano. My
only complaint with “Adia” are the
god-awful mule shoes McLachlan wore for the video. Late nineties fashion was
not kind to the eye, and the shoes of the era were by far the worst offender.
But I digress…
McLachlan’s voice is so high and ethereal on the
whole album that it can feel a bit otherworldly, but not in that creepy Thom
Yorke kind of way. Instead, this is the ethereality of angels. McLachlan
herself covers a lot of angel-themed ground, including on “Witness” and the appropriately titled “Angel” although in both cases these are songs about yearning for
heaven and not reaching it. It’s the human frailty that leaves
us burning inside, seeking the cold comfort in unhealthy places in the absence of something more perfect. The distance between that perfection and our idealized grace is where both art and tragedy dwells, and McLachlan nails it.
When I first got this record I played it so much
that I overdid it, and as a result I haven’t put it on regularly in years.
Hearing it again for the Odyssey reminded me that I will eventually come back
to it in force, and moreover that I’ll find some comfort there when I do.
Best
tracks: Building
a Mystery, Adia, Do What You Have To Do, Witness, Angel
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