SARAH MASEN - DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS - a review

Mon 29 Jan 2001

Stocki reviews Sarah Masen's up and coming album for Juice #15. Here's a preview of the review...

SARAH MASEN – DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS

Sarah Masen is a beautiful human being. Without doubt culturally good looking too. She is a gentle and tender soul. Aye and maybe a little bit whimsical too. Beneath all that she is a mind and heart and soul that is searching deep within herself and her world and her God for what this big hurting and hopeful world is all about. Beneath the tenderness she is courageous enough to ask the hardest of questions. Beneath the beauty she will look in the face of the world’s most ugly realities and provoke the questions and grope for some direction towards answers.

Dreamlife Of Angels is Sarah Masen made sound. It’s as accurate as any artist could ever be in describing themselves through their songs. It’s a stunning work of musical breathtake with it’s catchy melodies and the little brushes of musical accompaniment. It’s got quirky little phrasings that have you alert with surprise and the most sensitive of little aural thrills. Whether it’s the tranquil shuffle of the hopeful Valley, the stillness of Love Is Breathing about her daughter Dorothy Day Dark’s birth, the folksome endearment of her Supertramp cover Give A Little Bit, the acoustic funky David Gray-like groove of Midnight or the rockier Hit N Run, less is more and the more you listen the more you get from the spaciousness of John Jennings (Mary Chapin Carpenter) production.

Where Masen stands apart is in her literary approach to songwriting. She is a young woman in love with words and ideas and imagination. She has this God given ability to express the light and the dark and the shades where we all walk in between. There are a few gloomy shadows and then there are these moments when the bright makes the breaks in the clouds all sparkle and beam. She describes her life with it’s recent marriage and even more recent motherhood and the friends around her and tries to seek some insight to who we are, where we are, what we are going through and how we start to hear somewhere more worthwhile and peaceful. It’s an album full of hope and love and a new kingdom coming in the midst of the old one. It’s dangerous because it’s honest and it’s auspicious because it is grace drenched.

It may just be March and the first few months of the year are always a little lacking in album releases but it may be safe enough to say even now that this is the best album that will come out of the Christian industry in 2001. If anything betters it you should buy it for sure.