ANTI-FOLK/INDIE
I Just Need To Conquer This Mountain
Sarah Blasko
Independent
3.5 stars
For almost her entire life, Sarah Blasko has been beholden to something else; growing up in the apocalyptic Pentecostal church, marrying and divorcing young, struggling between an archaic belief system and a wont to create. She has, over the course of her life thus far, been climbing a mountain as she looks to escape from it all and as it stands, after enduring all manner of personal torment, perhaps that climb is over, her latest album an unfurling and a rebirth; the mark of someone moving on. For I Just Need… is, essentially, a howling paean to freedom; it’s about discarding the shackles of a life spent obsessing with what comes next, with what comes after, and embracing – despite the pain ubiquitous with such wrenching of emotion – the here and the now, the life that’s unspooling before Blasko’s, and our, very eyes.
I Can’t Wait Anymore, with its soaring strings over simple piano and percussion and in which Blasko powerfully laments, “I want to live like I’m reborn”, is perhaps the turning point song as she accepts that the life she’s lived is done. In My Head is the natural follow-up to this as, over an almost jaunty, bluesy motif, she “has a chance to start again”. As one would expect, it’s Blasko’s voice which drives the record, as beguiling and strong now as it was when she released her debut, seven albums and 20 years ago. Foil to her vocal across the majority of the record is simple piano along with astute percussion, occasionally accompanied by almost orchestral strings and smatterings of horns which lend the songs a poignant depth, giving them power with which they underscore the subject matter.
And so, in order to make an album like I Just Need… work, brutal honesty is the watchword, and it’s this which Blasko indeed brings in spades. On the likes of To Be Alone she confronts the breakup of her first marriage (“I came out of a marriage when I was only 26,” she sings simply, “I vowed I’d never give up myself that way again”), and Goodbye! which features vocals from Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Ryan Downey, where she sings, “I’m gonna run out of this place / Leave the hurt and the disgrace / It’s destroying me, I am longing to be free.”
While a good deal of the album, then, deals with all Blasko is no longer, this isn’t to say it doesn’t also celebrate what she’s become; which is to say, happy – with where she is, how she is, with that she’s left behind and how she’s used that to transcend. Fittingly, the song Divine closes out the record, the most vivacious track on the album, and one which basically celebrates all that’s been encapsulated thus far – “Oh this life,” she sings, almost in disbelief, ‘Oh this life is divine,” the sonic moment that Sarah Blasko reaches the peak of the mountain, and sees beyond it her promised land.
Samuel J. Fell