![]() ![]() She starts with understated lines (“Someone to love is bigger than your pride’s worth”), building to a wrenching crescendo on the title refrain, a ‘70s ballad melody and arrangement, beautiful in its austerity, moving in its soaring climax.Įlsewhere, Rae favors a traditional, organic vibe while incorporating thoroughly modern–sounding musical backdrops, especially on the RZA-style beat of “Feels Like the First Time”, with menacing piano plinks over the supremely funky drumming of Luke Flowers. Then it builds into a cascade of drums, organ, and vocal backdrops, while Rae herself delivers one her strongest vocal performances. The lead single, “I’d Do It All Again”, follows the first song’s controlling structure of a peaceful opening, this time with fingerpicked acoustic guitar and hushed vocals. ![]() The song builds with skittering drums and cymbal crashes that rain over swirling, ethereal backing vocals which, with the lyrics, suggest a dream that indistinguishably interposes the fog of memory and the starkness of reality. “He’s a real live wire / He’s the best of his kind / Wait till you see those eyes”, she sings in the present tense, setting up the upheaval and perplexity of the song’s hook: “Are you here? / ‘Cause my heart recalls that it all seems the same”. “Are You Here” quickly establishes both the album’s languid tone and the mournful meditations in the songs. ![]() The record opens with Rae’s simple guitar line and whispered vocals, sounding more like something from Exile in Guyville than any modern soul album. The Sea often captures the debut’s languorous delivery, yet the adult-contemporary coffee-house vibe has given way to deeper grooves, sonorous landscapes, and contemplative, poetic imagery. Given its inspiration, it forges a darker and more sophisticated sonic palette. The Sea is a richer effort than her debut. Rae’s music has evolved and deepened since her debut, an album that was lauded as a neo-soul record of refreshing ’70s-style grooves with live instrumentation, a welcome move away from the often crass and inorganic R&B that has tended to dominate the pop landscape over the last decade and a half. Eventually she found her way back into her art with the recording of The Sea, a record that deals with Jason’s death by looking both backward and forward, becoming at turns mournful and resolved. During this period Rae did “nothing”, as she puts it. Instead of jumping right into the expected speedy, momentum-seizing sophomore album, Rae found her life and career derailed by her husband’s death. That album was a smash in her native UK and in the States, with Grammy nods, millions sold, and four hit singles, including the sunny, inescapable “Put Your Records On”. ![]() Jason is, as is now well known, her husband, who died from a drug overdose in 2008 and whose death explains the delayed followup to Rae’s 2006 self-titled debut. At the end of the liner notes to this engaging album, singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae writes, “This album, like everything I do, is made to try and impress Jason Bruce Rae”. ![]()
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