Sarah Masen

Item: Dreamlife of Angels
Author: Chris Estey

Dreamlife of Angels

(2001)

Reviewed by Chris Estey

Discogs Apple Music TIDAL Amazon Music Spotify YouTube Music

Label Word RecordsHM Magazine #90July/August 2001

acoustic folk rock pop rock singer-songwriter

It had been a raging weekend of drinking and fighting. I was with a group of new friends, and I'd dropped a few hits of acid earlier in the week. My soul was restless and agitated, I needed some kind of connection, and the cheap wine and bullying of New Wavers in front of shows wasn't doing it. We stayed up all night by the river, screaming and crying and slapping each other, and then we went back to a tiny ghetto apartment near the park and the bass player passed out and his mysterious girlfriend made me a homemade Egg McMuffin and listened to me talk, all night long. I spoke about the hole and the hole spoke through me and she never blinked in weariness or pity. The next week when we all went swimming in the daytime I saw her body in a one-piece and it confused me, because just a few days before I could have sworn she was an agent from another realm, charity and mercy, a smiling face and healing hands, and that was all.

I get the feeling if I crawled drunken and bleeding onto Sarah Masen's porch, she'd pull me inside and take good care of me. "Oh, the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone," as Cohen said. I've heard voices like hers before, when I've swung my fists at reddened faces and then found myself months later curled into a ball in a tenement apartment with nothing but a mattress on the floor to live around. Music like this pulled me through, from somewhere else . . .

You've heard spots of this divinity before, in the happy but afflicted sprite blues of Victoria Williams ("In The Valley" here is both chilling and otherworldly-familiar in its angelic rural aural tumbling), the startled broken wail of Julie Miller or Leslie Phillips ("Girl on Fire"), or maybe the intellectual steadfastness of the Indigo Girls ("We Are a Beginning"). Reminiscent, yes, but originality is neither the goal nor a possibility with the singer / songwriter school; as with most genre work, purity of creation can be received when certain factors are aligned — in this case: true confession revealed; preoccupied concern for authentic craft; and most importantly, BELIEF.

This is a haunting, healing, violently seductive album of acoustic storytelling. Sarah has a talent for writing, and obviously loves to sing. She impresses with her voice and surprises with her observations and imagery ("Hit and Run," "Midnight"). On "Dreamlife" she sounds like the perfect listener — her voice a calm, smart witness, taking in the pain of the world and trying to attach it to the holiness she knows. Nice work.