Review: As Day Follows Night – Sarah Blasko

Read Time:1 Minute, 49 Second

As Day Follows Night – Sarah Blasko

Dew Process/Universal Music Australia

Recorded in Stockholm with all local musicians

Produced by Björn Yttling

As Day Follows Night seems to sum up the lilting feeling of going from day today, soaring through some and falling through others, and accepting the love and atrocity which such a manic existence entails. It is hardly surprising that the opening track feels like Fiona Apple on an old piano, lamenting, “Lately you’ve been down on luck, crying out to the man above. I believe in miracles, but a miracle you can’t control.” “Down On Love” plays as a wilful act of acceptance to the folly of love, flying in the face of the stand-out track at the other end of the spectrum, “Is My Baby Yours?”

I’ve tried so hard, it’s never enough,

You can’t make somebody love you,

while they’re still missing someone one.

Blasko cries out the repetitive bird call, echoing off the walls of a brick wall heart, resonating deeper with each call: Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours?

All I know of Stockholm is a boom and rattle, wailing wind, and the quaintness of delicate breath. All I know of the city is the way it cries out from under the wings of Sarah, a weeping in her wilting melody, and a warmth in her flourish. They say she’s chosen to live in the slithering shadows of momentary shimmers, shivering in the moonlight between ivory and steelstring gut, but I beg to differ. I’ve found her on the street corner and in my grandmother’s jewellery box, I have seen her shining face through frosted train carriage windows, and the hem of her garment floating down Melbourne laneways, as fragile and as sensitive as her singing voice to the wind. As solitary as a city in a memory. As Day Follows Night is a pillow weeping and flushed wrist cry for things lost, and mislaid, and sits melancholy on my shelf between Me’Shell NdegeOcello’s Bitter and Damien Rice’s O.