Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter
Oh, My Girl
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Two years after the desolate beauty of Reckless Burning, Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter return with a sophomore album that supersedes all expectations. Sykes' husky, hurt voice reigns in astral harmonies as guitarist Phil Wandscher swells up huge twangy waves that make the Court & Spark sound like Ashley Park.
Between them trees is all the world's fuckery," Jesse Sykes sings bitterly on the opening track of her second disc, Oh, My Girl. Her resolute tone, offset by a lone wandering viola, offers fair warning of what's to come: haunted tales of betrayal and loss, spun by a narrator who marks time by the seasons and speaks in beautiful, disarming nature metaphors. More backwoods
Read More than conventional alt-country, these ten pieces are quiet marvels of lamentation. They might move at a measured crawl, but the spell created by Sykes' frontier-woman wariness -- and the hovering-guitar atmospheres created by Phil Wandscher, the original Whiskeytown axman -- is utterly transfixing. Best experienced at night.
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