July 24, 1997

Publication title: The War Against Silence, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Glenn McDonald

Sarah McLachlan: Surfacing

The first disc in the case will be Sarah McLachlan’s new album, Surfacing. I’ve been waiting for this album for almost three years, ever since “Full of Grace”, her first post-Fumbling Towards Ecstasy composition, appeared on Nettwerk’s Decadence box set, and now that I have it I’m not about to let it out of my sight. Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, for me, was the album on which Sarah ascended from promising to divine. There are several good songs on Touch, her 1989 debut, and even more on 1991’s Solace, which to me is where Sarah’s compositional style and distinguishing idiosyncrasies first grew strong enough to try to support an album’s weight. Solace still sounds, though, to me, like an album that is as much Marchand’s work as Sarah’s. I can hear, in retrospect, more of her personality in it than I could at the time, but it is a record, in my taxonomy, on the order of Jagged Little Pill or Joan Osborne’s Relish, a record on which the personality of the singer to an extent transcends the music instead of actually guiding it.

My only reservation about Fumbling Towards Ecstasy is that it’s taken me a long time to fully appreciate it. I had two chances to put it on year-end top-ten lists, since I bought an import copy when it came out in Canada in 1993, and considered it again when it was released in the US the next year, but some twist of logic at the time convinced me that it wasn’t as good as Living Colour’s Stain or Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, two admittedly striking albums that nonetheless haven’t ended up meaning nearly as much to me. Fumbling Towards Ecstasy is, I now believe, one of the decade’s truly great recordings. It is the record on which Sarah sounds to me to have taken full control of her own music, like Kate Bush did on The Dreaming, Jane Siberry did on No Borders Here, Cyndi Lauper on Hat Full of Stars, Tori Amos on Boys for Pele. Sarah’s niche in this pantheon, as I array it, is Queen of Restraint. Kate is the Queen of Empathy, Jane of Detail (in her studio-mole mode), Cyndi of Individuality, Tori of Expression. Sarah’s icon depicts her standing barefoot on a soft rug on a darkened stage, her arms wrapped around herself in a mixture of self-consciousness and auto-eroticism. (Actually, her concerts depict her this way, too.) There is no fear on Fumbling Towards Ecstasy so paralyzing that she won’t hold it in her hands, tracing its curves, rubbing it along her face, tasting it to find out what it is, and there is no joy so electric that she won’t hold it at arm’s length, hefting it warily, knowing that there’s something darker at its core. You will wait in vain for her songs to explode, fray, skid, spin, sprint or crash. Aching love, unflinching pragmatism and mortal despair are all rendered in equal, impeccable grace. All are steps ultimately towards redemption, each one taken with a care that doesn’t depend on its immediate direction.
Maintaining this level of control is draining enough on record; how Sarah managed it over the course of a seemingly perpetual tour, which judging from the times it came through Boston seemed to grow more polished and flawless as it went, I can’t imagine. “Full of Grace” had almost reached the breaking point, it seemed to me, a song so beautiful that it gave me chills even in my overheated apartment, but a song so laden with sorrow that every time it ended I was a little surprised Sarah and I had both lived through it. “Building a Mystery”, Surfacing’s advance single and opening track, perhaps sensing this tension, retreats from the precipice a bit, and presents a significantly more approachable facade. Ash Sood’s drums are light, but steady, a calm kick/snare groove with none of Sarah’s usual rhythmic obliqueness (or was that Pierre’s?). Sarah and Michel Pepin’s electric guitars are warm and thick, Marchand’s backing vocals draw Sarah out of her self-containment a little, and the lyrics contribute a religious reference that people who heard “One of Us” should nod at, and even a “fuck” to be censored out of the radio version. An alien computer, sifting idly through this summer’s radio transmissions, might well tag “Building a Mystery” and Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch” with the same classification, essentially familiar music married to a commercially viable level of diffidence and sedition. We, however, have the technology, and more importantly, the context, with which to tell them apart. “Bitch”, I think, whether you like the song or don’t, is part of the tradition (ah, how constricted our notion of time has become that something that began two years ago can be called a “tradition”) that also connects Alanis Morissette’s “You Ought Know” and Tracy Bonham’s “Mother Mother”, personal catharsis as defiant aggression, calls to arms bearing standards for feelings older generations (meaning, again, those of just a few years ago) would have been reluctant to admit to, much less brandish. “Building a Mystery” has none of those features. It has “One of Us”‘ cadence, but the space in which it floats is quieter, the elements out of which it is built more brittle. The lyrics, half a portrait of the occult and half an attempt to understand its appeal, have more in common with Tori’s or Lisa Germano’s, and where Alanis, Tracy and Meredith’s songs are reactions to convention, “Building a Mystery” is at least partially an examination of the impulse to react, and the consciousness of what is often represented as instinct. It is not an anthem, and not a lifestyle affirmation, and is thus probably less marketable (however catchy), but also much more satisfying.

Surfacing wastes no time pretending, even thinly, to be an amiable pop record. “I Love You”, the second song, is atmospheric and eerily precise, Sarah’s high, breathy melody mercilessly compressed and equalized to emphasize the clicks at the ends of words, not eliminate them. The text starts out on sentimental ground, “I have a smile stretched from ear to ear / To see you walking down the road”, and as the song weaves an enticing island metaphor around the narrator’s love, it seems like Sarah’s between-albums marriage to Sood may have finally seeped into her lyrics. It’s a setup, though, as the subject of the narrator’s devotion ruins the scene by walking away, and the narrator is left lamenting her inability to produce the right words to express herself, even though, unusually for a song of this form, she’s actually come up with some excellent ones. The gentle acoustic guitar solo, which would have been a theme for contended rapture if the song had stayed on course, is incongruous and disturbing by the time it arrives, as it sounds peaceful, but I can’t figure out what peace in the narrator’s mind it could be reflecting, unless it’s complete resignation. “Sweet Surrender”, in fact, pursues this notion further, wrapping a simmering mid-tempo strut, with pulsing guitar feedback (which, it might be useful to know if you’re going to play this for the first time in the car, at first sounds like distant automobile horns) and acoustic guitar reverb that breathes in and out ominously, around the idea that words aren’t the point, after all, and that “Sweet surrender is all I have to give”. This would be more devout and platitudinal, however, if the chorus didn’t end on the worried “I only hope that I don’t disappoint you / When I’m down here on my knees”, to me a justifiable fear. Surrender may be sweet, but who worth surrendering to would want or accept it? If surrender really is all you have to give, how are you different from any other desperate, lonely soul. Or maybe this is exactly her point, and my obtuse insistence on searching for someone with a complementary personality, rather than simply a complementary exasperation with the search or a corresponding awareness of mortality, explains why I’m still single.
“Adia”, musically, with its piano, dry drums and plainly-delivered, slightly Joni-Mitchell-ish vocals, is a bit of a throwback to The Freedom Sessions, largely free from Sarah and Pierre’s usual textural manipulations. The lyrics begin forebodingly: “Adia I do believe I’ve failed you, / Adia I know I’ve let you down / Don’t you know I tried so hard to love you in my way? / It’s easy letting go.” If “I Love You”, which began with a helpless grin, ended up close to suicidal, I’m scared to see what depths a song that begins this unraveled can plunge to. Fittingly, though, this one reverses the album’s emotional curve, and although the song doesn’t actually find a path all the way to reconciliation, its chorus, “We are born innocent: / Believe me, Adia, we are still innocent”, does offer the consoling hope that a new beginning is always possible, no matter how much has happened. But “Do What You Have to Do”, a somber piano ballad accompanied only by spare acoustic bass and a few unobtrusive cymbals (and reminding me, especially in the chorus, of Cyndi Lauper’s “Sally’s Pigeons”), is an odd choice to come next, “Aida”’s upswell of energy bleeding away through open hands that make no attempt to hold it. The storyline is grim, again, the narrator drawn to her love by the same unopposable fate that pulls him away. This time, however, she seems to derive some sustenance from the inevitability of the rejection, and in her admission, “I have the sense to recognize / That I don’t know how to let you go”, I hear a form of resignation that carries the seeds of self-possession, like her refusal to let go is a function of her desires, not something that he controls, even implicitly. And where the sweetness of surrender doesn’t move me, something about the power of voluntary futility resonates.

The second half of the album, as if at a loss for where to go from there, or perhaps just hoping to approach the subject from a different direction, changes gears abruptly. On “Witness”, which revolves around the strained and confused couplet, “Will we burn in heaven / Like we do down here?”, the rest of the lyrics get mostly lost amidst Marchand’s obsessively detailed production, every snare hit articulated intently, Sarah’s harmony lines wailing against each other, the first half of the song sounding like a girl-group pout played at half speed, and the second half, Yves Desrosiers’ squalling, abstract guitar solo lurching along unsteadily under most of it, sounding more like a demo for something King Crimson will fill in with nine other guitar lines later. “Angel”, another piano dirge, is nearly soulful, Sarah tracing a number of melody lines that start off like her familiar tropes, but then veer away into figures with much older roots. The song reminds me more than once of Laura Nyro, and Sarah’s absence from the recent Time and Love tribute seems glaring in retrospect, and I’m guessing it was a function of scheduling, not willingness. And the album’s closest approach to a slinky groove, “Black & White”, glides on a supple drum shuffle and underwater upright bass, Sarah’s voice slipping into and out of its processing as if playing two parts without being totally sure how they’re supposed to be different. The song’s dance-unfriendly tempo notwithstanding, I have a feeling that the wordless semi-scat vocals and the strident guitar stabs (which must actually be either keyboards or bass, if the song credits are to be believed), if nothing else, will have a second life in a drum ‘n’ bass remake.

But just when the album seems to be untying itself from its pervasive grief, “Full of Grace” is back. It is different, here, it’s true, than it was by itself. Disembodied, trailing after Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, it was a coda separated from its symphony, and thus deprived of most of its mitigating associative power. Instead of recapitulating Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, triumphantly, it almost seemed to have forgotten about it already, and thus it strained to fit its memories of a whole album into three minutes. Here, though, at the end of an album of much smaller songs, its orchestral swell and lush melancholy are arresting and unexpected. The song has not, itself, changed, but here, with “Sweet Surrender” and “Do What You Have to Do” still swirling in my mind, its impassioned “But oh, darkness, I feel like letting go” feels less like submission and more like casting off. “All of the strength, and all of the courage, / Come and lift me from this place”, the chorus of Sarahs pleads, and this time it sounds less like she is summoning them to their final chore, and more like she’s seen a way out, and is taking what she still values away with her. And as the slow concluding instrumental, “Last Dance”, plays, I imagine that Sarah hasn’t been swallowed, she’s escaped. And I look around my apartment one last time, and prepare to follow her.