Sara Rachele is a folk singer from Decatur, Georgia, now based in Nashville after spending time in New York’s East Village and living in a 1979 Airstream Bus in East Atlanta Village. Back in 2018, Rachele released an album called Scorpio Moon, introducing her distinctive croon and earning comparisons to Julee Cruise in the process. With its doo-wop charm and pervasive strangeness, it’s not difficult to see where the parallels exist, Rachele channeling the Lynch-era Cruise in all of her sleek and slinky surrealism.
Late last month saw Sara Rachele release a brand new record, Scorpio Sun. The album swaps out the smoked spotlights and moonbeams of its sister in favour of something both sharper and more raw. There might be elements of a crooned ballad on opening track ‘Still Alive’, but they now share the stage with country and rock influences, and the shadowed romance of the vocals is replaced by a steely ferocity.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=601211667 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=1507894211]
The tone is apparent across Scorpio Sun, the songs finding Sara Rachele earnest and energetic and furious too. Such as on the growing squall of ‘Terry Richardson’, staring down the myth of the tortured genius and the misogyny it has justified for too long. Or the portentously brooding ‘Dead Squirrel in the Tractor Pool’, a distant thunderhead of a track that threatens to unload its violence from afar, possessing that uncanny Southern Gothic sensibility that makes the banal suddenly Biblical.
This sense of simmering energy is present on many tracks, from the slow and moody ‘Hollywood’ to the volatile country rock of ‘Dugan’s Doorstop’, but this is always balanced by a pervasive melancholy too. Songs like ‘What A Friend You’ll Be’ and ‘Lover Can’t You Just Get Over It (Love Me Like You Love Her)’ are loaded with heartbroken hindsight, the kind of longing that colours every sunset and holds tight through time. The aesthetic is captured best with Sara Rachele’s take on the African-American spiritual ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’, where sadness and loss coalesce into a beauty of their own, and conjure the possibility of something better on the other side.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=601211667 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=3586496739]
Scorpio Sun is out now and you can get it from the Sara Rachele Bandcamp page.
