Sarabeth Tucek – 'Get Well Soon' review
To name an album loosely based around your father’s death Get Well Soon requires a certain appreciation of irony, if not out-and-out sarcasm. However, the title of the second LP from Sarabeth Tucek – a New Yorker singer-songwriter in the tradition of Wilco and Neil Young – is pretty much the only part of the package that doesn’t play things wonderfully and affectingly straight.
Raw, heart-on-sleeve records can often seem trite, but Get Well Soon avoids mawkishness with a refinement in performance and intimacy of recording that lifts it above feel-my-pain whine. Tucek’s rich, weary voice, somewhere in the triangle created by Nico, Beth Gibbons and Joni Mitchell, holds everything together: on Things Left Behind, the elegant ballad that forms the centrepiece here, the cracks and creaks on her low notes are beautiful – it lends the track, and album, a impressive classiness and confidence.
8/10
