The Singles Jukebox

Pop, to two decimal places.

Sarah Jarosz – Build Me Up From Bones

Not Aubrey Plaza.


[Video][Website]
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Juana Giaimo: This is the first time I’m hearing her, so I can’t really compare it with other Sarah Jarosz material, but I can say that this song makes me want to know more about her. It’s not only her soothing voice or the mild changing intensities of the guitar, but the perfect combination of everything (including the sunny day I can see through my window as I write this) that fuses the melody to an innately natural and peaceful feeling. 
[8]

Mallory O’Donnell: Bluegrass touches might be obvious in the fingerpicking and vocal range, but that music resonates more interestingly in the close miking and wide panning of acoustic instruments. It’s a technique that coaxes warm, pleasing, and sometimes unexpected tones from these organic sources and creates a lot of space and atmosphere with what is essentially a very limited sonic palette. Overutilized, it quickly becomes muddy and cloying, and the strange and surprising tones get overwhelmed by a kind of hayseed schmaltz. This happens to a degree here, but it’s more Texas Hill County Sarah McLachlan than Appalachian Celine Dion. A good song that’s been poorly used by its producers, then.
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Edward Okulicz: The fiddle’s not just there for show; each distinct passage is a beautiful melody in its own right that underscores and enhances the words. It’s so intimate and delicate, but with a vocal performance that has a perfectly understated strength to it, as much torch song or pop ballad as bluegrass.
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Will Adams: The music mirrors the lyrics beautifully. A basic fingerpicking pattern is joined by pizzicato strings and bass guitar. Later, the simple harmony winds its way into unfamiliar territory. Guiding everything along is Sarah Jarosz’s warm timbre, which recalls Shawn Colvin at her most affecting. By the end, there’s something undeniably raw and human.
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Brad Shoup: She hangs those shaded autumnal chords over the small serration of violin and palm muting. It’s a fine portrait of devotion, presented as a matter of fact. It’s also a tribute to the slower seasons.
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Alfred Soto: She’s got the right touch: a weary voice sweetened by fiddle and cello. Working out the emotions line by line, Jarosz gives the impression she’s built her song from bones.
[7]

Anthony Easton: The fiddle here is modulated and so it becomes irregular, and the irregularization  of it works at an oblique angle to her voice, which fits quite comfortably into the dobro and mandolin. It’s not an unusual arrangement in the Appalachian tradition, but this does not seem to be caught in amber. It might be  that an earnest love song does not end in death, it might be her voice, her epic, intimate, lovely voice, but there is something both ancient and modern in how the song is constructed. You can run the matrilineal  line — Dolly around the time of “Me and Little Andy,” middle period Emmylou Harris,  Gillian Welch and “Elvis Presley Blues” — but like Appalachia itself, tradition and a desire intermingle with a profligate splendor.  This is not to say that the work is not her own, or that her performance choices and those of her musicians are not unique, because she has a voice that’s just floating into a carefully-constructed self identity. 
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