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Oh Rachael, dear Rachel, how beautiful is your second and sophomore album Elephants… Teeth Sinking Into Heart
I’m a the elephant who’s sinking into your moodly heartbreaking ballads, carelessly beautiful, melancholy half-asleep voice like smoke from a smoldering fire, deep dark emotive lyrics. Since your acclaimed debut album Happenstance in 2004 you have joined the pantheon of songwriters like Fiona Apple, Norah Jones or Sarah McLachlan before you.
Subtitled “A Record in Two Parts,” the album produced by John Alagia (Serena Ryder, Jason Mraz) starts with the song title “Elephants” toying with animal analogies — an elephant’s memory, a tiger’s ferocity — and as she sang it, Ms. Yamagata moved from sultry playfulness to accusation to a warning: “Keep one eye open at night.” As in her other songs, love was anything but a bed of roses. There’s a lot of self-involvement in her songs — there’s also an easy naturalness to her singing that keeps everything from dissolving into angst soup. Alternating moody heart-tuggers (the early “Meet Me by the Water,” the obsessive “Worn Me Down”) with gutsier, more cathartic rock tunes (“What if I Leave,” “Faster”), she kept the energy tight, and the emotions electric, throughout the set.
But Ms. Yamagata has her own considerable songwriting skills. She knows the power of concision, paring down words to the most basic situations: “Why don’t you call when you say you will, my dear?/Is it because I don’t belong to you?” she sang in “What If I Leave,” from the new album. She keeps her music understated enough to curb melodrama. When she does raise her voice, she’s not belting but crying out.
At 31 years old, Yamagata may be getting ready to move in new directions; it’s hard to mine the pain of love forever, and eventually you just get married and that’s that. But the material she demonstrated from her upcoming release show that Yamagata is carving out a place as one of America’s most interesting — and maybe incurable — romantics.
Elephants…Teeth Sinking Into Heart
by Rachael Yamagata
Original Release Date: October 7, 2008
Number of Discs: 2
Label: Warner Bros.
Buy Album: Click Here
Rachael Yamagata – 120 Seconds
Rachael Yamagata – Elephants
About the author : Alias is a French self-made-man, multi-talented artist, he is also a music-producer, screen writer and artistic director for films. Read more from this author
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