Listen With Sarah - Are You Sitting Comfortably ?

  by Emma Haigh

published: 5 / 6 / 2005

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Review

Sarah Nelson is one of the last artists to make the favourite list of John Peel; a comparatively latecomer to his ears, her debut album is a collection of four previously unreleased EPs starting with the 3-track demo that first captivated the legend himself in the two months before his death. Just a woman and her computer (who 'formed in 2002'), the album essentially consists of everything she sent in after Peel had phoned her himself to see what else she had to offer. Listen with Sarah is quirky and quark-full, a lot of it simply should not work, but some how she pulls it together. 'Animal Hop' is a chaotic orchestration of random barnyard noises in which you suddenly find the caws and lows and barks have become the vocals - each sampled into the chilled rhythmic beats and om-parp-parp of a lowkey brass section. 'Drum N Berceuse' runs as an endless loop of the piano-led intro to (1950s radio show) 'Listen with Mother' against synthy drum 'n' bass backbeats - a stunning little track made all the more enchanting when it is explained that the theme tune to the old radio show is from Gabriel Fauré's "Dolly" Suite called 'Berceuse,' the French for "lullaby." Her playful ease and humour is particularly evident in 'My Crow's Soft Sounds'(repeat that to yourself and pay attention), taking all its delightfully repetitive hums, blips and stirred twiddles from the sounds found on the Microsoft Windows operating system, never has "the ancient art of computer whispering" been done so well. Before the kitschy novelty can, however, run dry, the dark edgy tension of 'Inconjunctivitus', esoteric complexity of 'July mI,' and jangling confusion of 'Blue Parsley' slip in through the back door and slice down any thoughts that this may be easy listening. The collision of percussive trip-hop and trilling synth with distant guitar, the blissful rattle, pelting drums and gliding crackle of the unexpected flows like the icy drip of maple syrup tapped on a cold January morning straight into the buttery warm mouths of children. Its essence is juxtaposition, this charm is contradiction. The surge of excitement I felt when I put this on for the first time, the warmth that dappled my belly and spread like mercury acutely reminds me of the first time I heard the Beta Band, or Lemon Jelly. A small nubbing of joy filled me to the tips of my ears at this glimmer of relief from the burgeoning pretension of too-cool-for-school-ness of indie copycat pomp-rock. This is one more notch for John Peel, and a beautiful, if sad, reminder of how Listen with Sarah may be one of the last to be discovered in the slowfade from intelligent pop. "Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Now we can begin."

Track Listing:-

1 Animal Hop
2 Drum N Berceuse
3 My Crow's Soft Sounds
4 Blue Parsley
5 July (Part 1)
6 July (Part 2)
7 Frogs Sing, Birds Dance
8 Inconjunctivitis
9 Om-pa-cha-pap-cha-pap
10 My Dog's Got No Nose
11 Dub-cha-pap
12 I.C.
13 Rainsticks
14 We Are The Plan