March 28, 1994

Publication title: NY Times, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Stephen Holden

Reflective young singer with a maturing style

Halfway into her concert at Town Hall on Friday evening, the Canadian singer and songwriter, Sarah McLachlan, introduced a recent song called “Ice” and explained that it was inspired by a trip to Thailand and Cambodia. The spectacle of widespread poverty, prostitution and AIDS, she said, saddened her and at the same time left her feeling blessed about her own comfortable surroundings, which until then she had taken for granted.

“Ice,” the most striking song on Ms. McLachlan’s new album “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,” (Arista) is a sober folk-rock ballad that evokes the numbness of sexual slavery in language that is mostly indirect. “The only comfort is the moving of the river,” sings the narrator, who describes her soul as anchored in pain.

Vocally, Ms. McLachlan is an heir of the young Joni Mitchell. Singing in a clear, pristine folk-pop voice that like Ms. Mitchell’s breaks in sobbing yodel, she conveys the pained sensitivity of a dreamer idealist whose life is one of continual loss of innocence.

Ms. McLachlan’s visit to Southeast Asia seems to have left its mark on other songs as well. The music on “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” and in the concert at which she was accompanied by two guitars, keyboard, bass and drums, has more textural weight and coloristic subtlety than that on her two earlier albums.

Her melodies are sparer and more sharply outlined, and her emotionally loaded stream-of-consciousness lyrics have shed some of their girlish frills. Ms. McLachlan, like Kate Bush and Tori Amos, writes reflections that tend to evoke emotional landscapes rather than describe situations. If her lyrics are too vague and overly reliant on trite symbolism to achieve the archetypal resonance to which she aspires, their marriage of words and music has a smooth oracular flow. And her arrangements, which skillfully incorporated a harmony singer and crisply defined instrumental flavors, lent her songs a sense of shape.

If Ms. McLachlan has a lot more artistic growing up to do, a song like “Ice” stands as an encouraging signpost in the right direction.