Chandelier

Rachel Sage
MPress Records

It's hard to talk about Sage without sounding clich?d, because she's in the camp of female singer-songwriters who enthusiastically plumb their own relationships for material. Cue up some adjectives like emotional, confessional, raw, etc. What sets Sage apart is her brilliant ear for arrangements. Each of the varied songs on this disc sets an effective and different mood, from the ominous swirl of piano on "Vertigo" to the soothing rhythms of "Invincible" and the jazzy chords that support a dream-of-consciousness riff on "Site-Seeing." Musically, Sage can pull out all the stops without getting melodramatic, a skill not always evident in her lyrics. One moment she's tossing off little bits of brilliance like "He was so poor that he stole out of habit," the next it's unmodulated angst like "I knew he was gonna break my soul." That still makes her more thoughtful than a lot of pop singers, so take the bad with the good and float away on her gorgeous sound.