Best of '11: Sarah Jaffe
Sarah Jaffe's The Way Sound Leaves a Room is, hands down, among the very best recorded things released this year. Maybe it's a function of aging, but the idea of besting certain things, ranking absolutely #1 on down, seems silly. There have been a handful of necessary things to listen to this year, and Jaffe's ep is among them. Decide for yourself what sort of rank you'd like to give it.
To prime the Jaffe pump, here's a video:
What's remarkable about that is how seemingly simple the whole thing is. Watch Jaffe open her mouth and just pour gorgeousness as if it was as simple as throwing the wash into the dryer. Notice how absolutely controlled the thing feels and seems—the song seems perfectly boundaried, something with real edges but flexible as well (all that background sound, all the tiny pieces coming together like elements suddenly perfectly aligning over and over).
You think it's a rarity somehow? That she doesn't do that every damn time? Here's more:
I was lucky enough to see Jaffe with friends in Omaha and we were among maybe 30 people in the audience, and Jaffe herself was incredibly cool and kind and drinking whiskey or bourbon, I can't remember which, and the reason she's worth talking about as among the very most exciting musicians at present is how shockingly quickly she's growing. Before talking at any length about The Way Sound Leaves a Room, let's revisit Suburban Nature, her 2010 debut. It's a gorgeous, compelling disc, and it was among my favorite records of last year, but it was also, indisputably, younger, less sure of itself. For the audacious confidence of tracks like "Perfect Plan" or "Before You Go," there were shakier, less certain tracks like "LUV." Weirdly, the song that at the time seemed to me the absolutely most compelling thing imaginable—"Clementine"—still holds up to a degree, but its murmury hesitance is striking now, in the context of Jaffe's latest.
The Way Sound Leaves a Room is an audacious and confident collection of 8 tracks that I think offers pretty inarguable proof that Jaffe's the most exciting thing going. Evidence? Fucking ep starts off with a cover of Drake's "Shut it Down," the song stripped down and given harmonies and pianos and a tiny sandpapery casiotone drum beat in the track's back, and if you hear Jaffe's version before hearing Drake's, you'll never hear the original again—Jaffe owns the thing, absolutely. The ep would be fantastic enough just for that cover (which for the record is, in my mind, among the best covers of the year, a category which'd have to include the two amazing covers Bon Iver dropped this year [Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" and his cover of Bjork's "Who Is It" at his DC show]), but of course there's more.
There is a piano version of "Clementine," which to me feels weaker than the original, but even that's not a mis-step or anything, just a track that doesn't quite hang as awesomely as the rest. For my money, the second half of the ep, from the title track to the haunting, almost Imogen-Heap-ish "All that Time," is why this thing stands so tall and powerfully. What the listener gets in these four tracks is a level of confident messiness that was developing in parts in Suburban Nature but is hugely, awesomely more pronounced now. There's also just more noise: electronics in "When You Rest," and, in the ep's single, "A Sucker For Your Marketing," a hard bass line couples menacingly with the lyrics ("Whatever you put out, I'm gonna buy it / so what's your latest, I wanna try it / are you still in love, are you over it again / when the damn thing grew with no intent,") to make one of the most aggressive I-want-you songs I've ever heard.
Jaffe's been at the top of my list of holy-shit-she-can-do-anything artists for awhile, and this new ep bodes exceptionally well for her. It's past time to consider what she might do next, how she might do it: look what she's doing. No one is doing anything close to what she's doing; no one's taking such big, masterful steps. Listen now, if only so you can brag later, when she's got all the attention she already deserves.
(If yr interested, here's a brief interview I did with her last year)
