Sunday, October 9, 2011

Sarah Jaffe - The Way Sound Leaves A Room



I love a good B-sides and demos EP. It's always fun to hear an up-and-coming artist tackle tunes from your favorite bands. It's just as much fun to hear the raw versions of new songs from the eagerly awaited next album; But to open with a Drake cover seems like a stab for broader commercial appeal, or a blatant display of Sarah Jaffe's awful taste in music. Either way, she immediately lost me for the rest of the album. Follow that with an off-key rendition of a Cold War Kids single, just to show us the diversity she keeps on her ipod (just like you do), and we're off to a pretty bad start. So why not keep going downhill, then? Cue another version of “Clementine”. Oh, you know…that song that you've heard a million times in the car with your parents, on the radio at the grocery store and everywhere else with functioning speakers. If you liked it the first time, then buy this rehashing, because there's nothing we love more than things that we already know! At this point, I'm compelled to stop listening out of pure disgust, but I push forward in search of something greater. I don't find it. “Better Than Nothing” really isn't. It's just filler to kill a bit of time before we get to the title track. “The Way Sound Leaves a Room” is Jaffe at her best: strumming, singing, simple and boring. No new ground broken there. “When You Rest” is definitely a step in a new direction. Not to say that that's a good thing, however. This track falls somewhere between a bad 80s new wave ballad and Radiohead. The single for the EP, “A Sucker For Your Marketing”, is probably just a fan letter put to a drum track: catchy in all the right ways to get some more radio play. The title of the final track, “All That Time”, reminds me that I wasted the last half-hour of my life listening to this and I get sad. Being a simple piece, it ends by leading into the familiar opening guitar of “Clementine”, reminding listeners, once again, why they love Sarah Jaffe so damn much in the first place. Overall, this EP seems like a transition piece. She's alienated some of her younger fan base by becoming the poster child for adult contemporary. So by updating her sound, without really pushing the boundaries of radio friendly music, she manages to bolster her street cred and keep the money from the KXT crowd rolling in. S-M-R-T.

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