If life is like a box of chocolates, a Sarah McLachlan record is like a bag of lettuce – listeners know what they’re going to get. She’s an artist that never really takes chances with her music or tries to “reinvent herself,” which gives rock critics a boatload of excuses to break out their red pens and rip her to shreds. But with last year’s release of Afterglow, another interesting and successful album, it’s becoming clear that McLachlan is not the weepy pretender that many perceive her to be. When the singer/songwriter takes the stage at HSBC Arena on Sunday, fans will know precisely what to expect – an hour or so of well-written, ethereal pop songs, sung by a spellbinding vocalist.
The Nova Scotia native has returned to the spotlight after taking a six-year break to focus on raising a family. Her recent hit “Stupid” make you wonder how successful that went (it contains lines like, “Sleep has left me alone/To carry the weight of unraveling where we went wrong”), but regardless, she’s lost none of her trademark songwriting polish. Afterglow contains ten inoffensive, luxurious tracks, which cover the well-tread territories of desire, lost love and courage under fire. Folks who find her vaguely religious musings to be melodramatic will shiver at odes to self-discovery like “Fallen” and “Train Wreck,” but every bit of Afterglow is produced with a steady hand, and the end result is memorable at the very least. The orchestral flourishes of “Stupid” are effective bedfellows to the song’s unstable narrator, and the closing “Dirty Little Secret” is classic McLachlan – stripped-down, simple piano, gentle vocals and introspective lyrics. The album is basically a carbon copy of her previous triumphs, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and Surfacing, but it’s getting to a point in the artist’s career where even the naysayers have to respect her consistency.
McLachlan has scattered five fairly captivating records over the last 16 years, and shows no signs of either going away or changing the formula. It’s not much of a stretch to label her as the AC/DC of sensitive singer/songwriters. The latter built an impenetrable heavy metal franchise by following a simple method: Play blues riff. Scream about why sex is cool. Repeat. McLachlan’s performance is sure to span every phase of her career, and every single number will be driven by those familiar, reverb-laden piano chords and dramatic, breathy choruses.
Afterglow has had a largely negative response from critics, which makes me wonder if McLachlan is ever going to get the credit she deserves from music snobs. She was one of the only true originals that flourished during that atrociously hypocritical “women can play instruments too” period of the late-‘90s. Now that the Lilith Fair is long gone, Jewel has sold her soul, Tori Amos is talking to the fairies in her medicine cabinet and Paula Cole is trapped on Dawson’s Creek, Sarah McLachlan remains at the forefront of pop music. She returns to Buffalo as relevant as ever, ready to sing pretty songs about falling in and out of love. For those about to weep, she salutes you.
Appeared in the August 19, 2004, issue of Artvoice.