Sarah June, In Black Robes

review by dave heaton

Sarah June sounds like she’s singing and playing guitar in an empty room in a big, old, empty house. I played In Black Robes loud in my house, itself old and at the time relatively empty of furniture, and it echoed through every room like she was singing to the walls themselves, to ghosts and cob-webs from the basement to the attic.

It may be her voice that makes me think of ghosts. She sounds like a child, like a whisper, like someone not quite of this world. It may also be the cool blues strut in her minimalist guitar playing, the way she sounds like the ghostly reincarnation of an old blues singer, singing of highways, cars, liquor and cards. Or the way she sounds like she’s watching us from afar, like in “From My Window High”: “From my window high / I study you / while you tie your shoes.”

It’s all of those things, but it definitely also has a lot to do with how much death hangs over each song. In “The Reaper”, the title figure is a beat-jazz cool cat tipping his hat to people as he takes them down (It’s also the song where the album title comes from.) On “Judgment Day”, the reaper turns her into a skeleton and betroths her to sing love songs to him. Fighting death, she lives on the edge, trying to tilt the scale back towards life. In “Crossbones in Your Eyes”, she’s one of a legion of skeletons, rattling her bones as she drives her ’68 black Cadillac, on the prowl for more souls.

Other songs carry the death/car imagery forward (“Bluesy Melody”), or tackle the potential death of a city (“Motown”) or aging of people (“Paper Lantern”). The final track “’Til You Hit the Pavement”, where she sings “you don’t know you’re falling ‘til you hit the pavement”, gives us the notion that life is a kind of ever-present purgatory. Life is the act of being “caught between ground and sky”, or walking down the street with one eye out for that black ’68 Cadillac.

{www.silbermedia.com}