Sarah Blasko - The Overture & The Underscore

Genre rock Publisher Dew Process External Links Official Website Dew Process

So the other night I went to see Scout Niblett - not intentionally, you understand; she was opening for Shellac. Luckily I was spared her horrendous faux-naif version of "Uptown Top Ranking" (which turns out to be on a par with Dynamite Hack's version of "Boyz N Tha Hood"). Anyhow, the sub-Joanna Newsom stylings of Miss Niblett got me thinking about what constitutes noise-rock these days. It used to be that in the days of Test Department and good old Neubauten, noise meant controlled fury, a sound that was genuinely frightening, not unfocused noodling by talentless chancers who are just too lazy to learn how to play.

Sarah Blasko has learned how to harness the power of noise. By this I mean that The Overture and the Underscore brims subtly with tiny details that combine to make the album genuinely unsettling, like late-night AM radio or a screaming fight outside your window that stops too suddenly. An accomplished musician, Blasko does not try to hide her enormous talent, going so far as to print the tablature alongside the lyrics to her songs in the CD booklet. She and collaborator Robert Cranny build a web of sound using an alarming arsenal of instruments, including Morse code transmitters and toy keychains. Unfortunately, the result almost overshadows Blasko's haunting vocals. Though beautiful, they are overshadowed by the instrumentation, even dampening the album's effect. Around the fifth track, her boredom with singing is almost palpable - she probably would much rather be knob-twiddling than vocalizing.

"These things are marked by what they hide," she sings on "Counting Sheep," and it's this lyric that reveals the truth about The Overture and the Underscore. Blasko's talent for creating brilliantly disturbing ambient soundscapes using standard singer-songwriter structure is hidden by the songs themselves.