Sarah Mary Chadwick's voice could reduce a house to rubble; if pointed in the right direction, it could shake the leaves from a tree or send a sailboat out to sea.
Where some might be tempted to surround that voice with complimentary enormity, the magic of Chadwick's music is its often unassuming smallness. Even when she does dress her songs in more extravagant attire — the bruising horns and rolling drums of the divine "Please Daddy," the entirety of The Queen Who Stole the Sky, recorded on a massive pipe organ — there's a warm grit to everything, a lived-in insularity that allows her rib-cracking voice to break through.
"Shitty Town," the lead single from Chadwick's upcoming Messages to God, manages to retain that smallness while opening the windows just slightly — a breeze moves through the song, expanding her music in new textural directions. Over deceptively chipper piano, Chadwick exorcizes a ruined love with her still-potent mix of hilarity and heartache: "You left me a widow in my life / Except not a widow, you're alive / With your shitty car / And that shitty town / Sleep with shitty girls / 'Cause they're all around."
Swathed in ribbons of flute from longtime collaborator Hank Clifton-Williamson and opalescent atmosphere courtesy of co-producer Tony Espie, it's Chadwick's voice, tearing across the arrangement like a rock thrown from deep space, the grounds "Shitty Town" — she's rarely sounded so celestial and enormous.
(Kill Rock Stars)Where some might be tempted to surround that voice with complimentary enormity, the magic of Chadwick's music is its often unassuming smallness. Even when she does dress her songs in more extravagant attire — the bruising horns and rolling drums of the divine "Please Daddy," the entirety of The Queen Who Stole the Sky, recorded on a massive pipe organ — there's a warm grit to everything, a lived-in insularity that allows her rib-cracking voice to break through.
"Shitty Town," the lead single from Chadwick's upcoming Messages to God, manages to retain that smallness while opening the windows just slightly — a breeze moves through the song, expanding her music in new textural directions. Over deceptively chipper piano, Chadwick exorcizes a ruined love with her still-potent mix of hilarity and heartache: "You left me a widow in my life / Except not a widow, you're alive / With your shitty car / And that shitty town / Sleep with shitty girls / 'Cause they're all around."
Swathed in ribbons of flute from longtime collaborator Hank Clifton-Williamson and opalescent atmosphere courtesy of co-producer Tony Espie, it's Chadwick's voice, tearing across the arrangement like a rock thrown from deep space, the grounds "Shitty Town" — she's rarely sounded so celestial and enormous.