Customer Reviews

Day One

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Super smart indie folk/pop with sunny melodies and perceptive lyrics. Sarah's got a warm, generous sensibility but also enough toughness and heartache to make her really interesting. If you like great indie songwriters like Liz Phair, Lou Barlow, Elliott Smith, Ben Lee, Quasi, or good ole twangy REM, you'll probably really like this. It's a comforting CD that's hard to stop replaying. And you just gotta love someone who can sneak 'humdinger' and 'lipsmacker' into the same song. This is one of those relatively unheralded debut CDs you hope your friends will tell you about.

There is a lot of noise about the music scene in the Pacific Northwest. There's a good reason for that. One of them is Sarah Dougher. She writes with consideration about passion, ambition, feminism, addiction and failure. There's just something about this album that makes it stay in the cd player. Interesting, insightful lyrics and melodic passages make this difficult to turn off. I have it on repeat, personally.

This is the record to play when you're in and out of your car--gasoline, droppings off, pickings up, quick errands and idiot goodbyes--beginning a big lonesome journey and about to love it. It's for you when a glowey sunshine casts a friendly unreality on the urban world as it becomes sparser and sparser. It's for you feeling delightful hardly showered, dirty-clothed, ill-fitted; cocky though slouched, brilliant in 2 or 3 senses of the word. This is you running away and running toward at the same time.

Comparisons to early Liz Phair might do if I were forced to lump Dougher with somebody, but Sarah Dougher's a little more dissonant, a little less successfully sassy. Spiritually she may belong with Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Bonfire Madigan, The Butchies and what not; musically, she's closer to the Velvet Underground scoring Free To Be You and Me. This is one of those albums that fits both when it plays through your headphones as you are pouring over the lyric sheet, and when it is the soundtrack to your day's activities.

Sometimes the lyrics get lost in the low-fi noise, but overall, I dig it. Smart, earnest songs from one of those Little Voice That Could singers. This is one that will assure you you are not alone, when you probably are.

One of the best records I heard in 1999. Subtle and moving songs about Texas and Portland, love and politics, the seasons and the self-indulgent.

The songs on this record grow on you with each listen. Sarah Dougher's songs on the Caddallacca record only hint at her talent and vision. The songs are gritty, rueful, sad, redemptive, and the melodies are incredibly infectious. Her understated style should serve as a lesson to drama queens like Tori Amos. This is one of the few records this year that I feel lucky to have heard.