MP3: Sara Berg - Crawl back from under
I saw the Lisa Gerrard doc "Sanctuary" yesterday which got me thinking about the human voice as an instrument, about how affecting it can be even if you don't understand the words being sung or, as in Gerrard's case (as with Sigur Rós and others), no actual words are being used at all. Emotion comes through the performance and melody, not the lyrics. And that made me think back to the "Ny musik för landssorg" comp (as discussed here) - the gravity of the subject matter led each artist to use wordless vocals, if they used words at all. Really, what can one say to ease the suffering of national tragedy? Words fail us. However, there is one exception and that is Sara Berg and her track "Not alone". The sentiment is simple enough that it works, but it's still a risky move. The potential for pompous pretention is infinite.
In addition to its appearance on "Ny musik för landssorg", "Not alone" also appears on Sara Berg's album "When I was a young child I used to feel pleasure from playing with others". Generally speaking, the formula remains the same - Sara excels at taking deep sentiments and simplifying them, setting them against her tightly wound beats. What could easily turn into the kind of overwrought, all-too-serious display that turns people off from most theatrical goth-rock, is instead handled with care and the right amount of subtlety. Some tracks, such as today's mp3 "Crawl back from under", work better than others, but that's mostly due to the music, not the vocals. Sara is unusually vocal-centric for an electronic artist and I think it's both an asset and a liability; an asset because it differentiates her from the rabble, a liability because her tracks can often be lacking. At her worst, it's never that bad, but she never quite soars either. I have to say that I appreciate her on a conceptional level more than anything else.
Sara Berg - Crawl back from under