Published on Nov 4, 2000
Touch is finally released in Asia, complete with hand-drawn
liner notes by the Tree Fairy of Folk Pop herself. While Sarah
McLachlan has done a lot in the press lately to shed herself of
this image (now we know that a: she swallows and b: she’s had a
dream where she was a beautiful gay man with two penises),
Touch, her debut album, pretty much says that she asked for
it in the beginning.
Not to say that the album isn’t a musically innovative, almost
daring piece of folk-pop fusion. “Vox”, the song that made her an
underground hit, is driven by McLachlan’s highland-edge voice,
12-string guitar and some terrific live drumming that creates a
fantasy of a dance track, and the remix at the end of the album
“Vox (Extended Version)” is just as lively and strong.
The vital percussion drives a lot of the saccharine out of the
tracks, such as in “Trust”, the dramatic “Steaming” and the
multi-textured instrumental track “Uphill Battle.” All of the
instruments seem to be played live without looping, and the final
cut is something at once intimate, warm, and human.
The problem is the lyrics.
McLachlan reached a songwriting peak with
Fumbling Towards Ecstacy that she both built towards and
came down from. Before
Fumbling Towards Ecstacy, she was singing things like “I’m
lost inside this tangled web in which I lay entwined, oh why”
(“Vox”) or “if I cried me a river of all my confessions will I
drown in my shallow regret?” (“Black”). After
Fumbling Towards Ecstacy is a lot of the same self-absorbed
dirge: “all I feel is black and white / and I’m wound up small and
tight” (“Black & White”). But anyway, who reads the liner notes
these days except picky little critics?
Much of the power of McLachlan’s music, however, is the perfect
way her words mesh with her songs, as if they were created at the
same time. You won’t find any of these songs on
Touch; it’s
Solace where McLachlan finally begins to come to her
own.
Still, the musical concepts on
Touch are very interesting, and McLachlan fans won’t be very
disappointed with tracks such as the Enya-like voice textured title
track or the sorrowful ballad “Ben’s Song.” I’ve seen copies of
both
Touch and
Solace in Thailand, but here in Korea,
Solace hasn’t been released; the hint here is that for those
who understand English, get
Solace (or better yet,
Fumbling Towards Ecstacy) where the words count. For those
of us who listen to McLachlan for the music,
Touch is probably the better choice.