Sarah Blasko - As Day Follows Night
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
As Day Follows Night is the third full-length album from Australian singer-songwriter, Sarah Blasko. Her last album, What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have, won an ARIA Award for “Best Pop Release” in 2007. The ARIA Awards are the Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards and Sarah Blasko has been nominated seven times since she released her debut EP in 2002. That first EP could have been classified as trip-hop, but each successive album has introduced more and more organic sounds. Many of the songs on the past two albums also relied heavily on guitar as the central element, but As Day Follows Night is more stripped-down and has very little guitar by comparison.
The opening song is unexceptional, but the next song, “All I Want,” is a haunting melody of ambiguity with a distinctive western vibe…and it’s easily her best song since “The Garden’s End.” Next up is “Bird On A Wire,” one of the better tracks on the album, which is followed by “Hold On My Heart,” the worst song on the album. “We Won’t Run” starts out like a faster version of “The Way I Am” by Ingrid Michaelson, but it eventually becomes its own thing. The two remaining noteworthy songs are the hypnotically resonating “Sleeper Awake,” and “Lost and Defeated,” a song that plods along with slightly less gloom.
- Score
- 76%
As Day Follows Night is slightly better than The Overture and the Underscore, but it’s still a couple points behind What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have. The new musical direction on this release feels like a natural progression for Blasko and even though this isn’t her best album that doesn’t stop it from being one of the top twenty albums of 2009.
